The Culture and Sport of Skiing: From Antiquity to World War ll

Chapter 5. Creating The Skisport

chapter 5 Creating the Skisport In all countries there are now enough people who think of winter sport as mere business.—Winter Sports Review, 1912–13 The ski-­ing field is the finest sanatorium yet discovered. —Engadine Year Book, 1913 If Idræt was not for export, skiing was. However much Nansen may have inveighed against “sport,” when skiing ceased being utilitarian, when its cultural uses gave way to recreational entertainment, skisport became the new winter attraction among both the townsmen of Scandinavia and the landed wealthy and urban bourgeoisie of much of the rest of Europe. They modernized skiing, providing standardization of equip-­ ment, of competition, and of pleasure. This standardization, as Allen Guttmann showed in his influential 1978 analysis, From Ritual to Record, is the great mark of modernization.1 exhibitions Ski meets in the nineteenth century often provided the opportunity for exhib-­ its of equipment. When each Norwegian valley took pride in its local skis, very little change in ski design had taken place. Only when the competitions on Huseby Hill and later Holmenkollen provided something of a national expo-­ sure, did people come to realize that one form of ski was, perhaps, better than another. Prizes were awarded for the best-­made skis. At the manufacturing competition held in conjunction with the Huseby meet of 1879, the one in which Sondre Norheim put up such a spectacular show, six counties were represented. Most of the ash, pine, and birch skis were made in Numedal and Telemark. No first prize was awarded, but Knut Olafsen Haugen from Kviteseid in Telemark won second prize with his ash ski. Sondre Norheim’s brother’s ski was awarded fourth place. The next year, twenty craftsmen competed. Hellik Gulliksen Koppang, third the previous year, a man from Numedal, won first prize for his Telemark ski. Already, then, pride in each valley’s ski type was beginning to give way before the effort to make the most suitable ski. Larsen’s of Christiania advertised a ski of its own manufacture “following the Telemark design” in 1886. Laminated skis made their appearance in 1891. They were creating the skisport 71 not an immediate success since the glue did not hold when the skis became damp. The experimental nature of the laminated ski showed that local tradi-­ tion was not so important.2 The Swedish Ski Museum in Umeå has made a major effort to document the old ways of making skis and has produced a fascinating film of the construction process. Norway’s Holmenkollen went one better: they hired Thomas Aslaksby to make skis in the old style, using old tools and craft ways. His demonstrations are very popular, yet another example of how skiing’s heritage in Norway takes center stage in her winter culture. The exhibitions at the early ski meets and elsewhere continued, and Nor-­ wegians began to exhibit skis abroad. At the 1878 Paris Exposition, Henry Duhamel found a pair of skis lined up by some Canadian snowshoes. He bought both but, quite extraordinarily, a Swede (Norwegian? This was twenty-­ five years before Norwegian independence) in attendance could not explain how to use them. For ten years Duhamel experimented pretty unsuccessfully; “I felt like a carp wishing to be a potato.” The problem lay with the binding. “Sufficient cord,” he had been told, but he was not shown how it should hold the boot secure. Only when he saw a series of photographs at the 1889 exposition was the problem solved and he ordered fourteen pairs of skis from Helsingfors (as Helsinki was called in those days).3 It just shows what a role happenstance can play, and makes nonsense of Guttmann’s sociologi-­ cal requirement of “rationalization” as one of the seven indicators of modern sport. It also denies the post modernists’ thesis of the denigration of the indi-­ vidual in explanations of what happened; Duhamel became the driving force behind skiing in the Grenoble area. Norwegian skis were also exhibited at the International Hunting Exhibi-­ tion in Cleve, Holland, in 1881.4 The Dutch repeated their success with a ten-­day enlarged show in Amsterdam the following February, where “Snow, Ice and Mountain Sport” vied for attention with Riding, Hunting and Shoot-­ ing, Cycling, Water Sports, Athletics, Fishing and Photography.5 The Todtnau Ski Club put on an exhibition in the Feldbergerhof in 1891 but it had little effect outside the Black Forest. The following year German-­manufactured skis were on view in the sports exhibition at...