History of Skiing
The ski industry today is huge. The manufacture, development and sale of ski clothes, holidays and equipment is a vast business and ski resorts are found in almost every one of the world’s continents (with the exception of the Polar Regions).
Before the advent of skiing as a popular leisure pursuit, the art of travelling across snow with pieces of plank attached to the feet was confined to those inhabitants of snow bound areas who used the primitive ski as a means of going about their daily business and essential travel. Archaeologists have found skis in Sweden that have been dated to around 2500 b.c. Cave art suggests that the practice of skiing predates even this period and was probably developed by early man as a means to enable him to hunt in deep snow conditions. Over the centuries, the design and materials used in the manufacture of skis evolved and speed became more of an important issue.
It wasn’t just the equipment that changed so much as the style and technique and by the 18th century, the people who lived around Telemark in Norway had developed the Telemark and the Christie turns as a method of controlling the rate of descent down a slope. They held competitions in various ski disciplines such as jumping and cross country races and discovered a number of further techniques that are still used to this day in modified forms. These people certainly discovered the pleasure of skiing as a leisure pursuit rather than just the utilitarian activity it had been until then. They can reasonably be thought of as the pioneers of skiing as we know it today and skiers and indeed snowboarders everywhere should be very grateful.
By the early part of the 20th century, the sport had become very popular throughout Northern Europe and in 1924 the resort of Chamonix held the first ever Winter Olympics. In those days, the only style of ski was a basic Nordic type with the boot secured to the ski by the toe. As every skier will know, this binding does not make downhill runs at speed either easy or safe. A new binding was developed to fix the whole boot to the ski allowing for better control at high speed and giving the user the ability to negotiate much steeper terrain. This new style was called Alpine skiing and very quickly caught on so that the Innsbruck Games in 1936 saw the first Olympic Alpine event.
During these decades and particularly at the end of the war in 1945, it was quickly realised that skiing as a leisure and holiday pursuit was here to stay and there was heavy investment put into developing resorts and installing the newly invented lift systems, particularly in the Alpine areas of Switzerland and Austria. Initially it tended to be a pastime for the rich and famous, but as global economies recovered, an increasing number of ‘ordinary’ people discovered the joys of winter holidays and today, ABTA figures show that well over 10 million UK residents go skiing each year.
