Two boards and a way to stand up: that is all skiing ever needed, and people have been doing it for thousands of years. These stories run from a ski pulled out of a Swedish bog to a snowboarder who won an Olympic ski race, by way of a mail carrier who was never paid, a chairlift copied from a banana conveyor, and a ski jumper the judges punished for flying too far.
Every tile in a Skiing and Snowboarding game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Champions
nine stories
1The ski double who won the real thing
On the tile: G. Fraser1948
Before she raced for herself, Gretchen Fraser skied for the camera, standing in for the skating star Sonja Henie in Thin Ice and Sun Valley Serenade. At St. Moritz in 1948 she was the first skier down the slalom course and posted the fastest first run, by two tenths of a second. As she prepared to lead off the second run, the timing system failed and the race stopped for seventeen minutes. She came back to ski the second fastest second run and win, the first American to take an Olympic alpine skiing title. She added a silver in the combined.
Andrea Mead Lawrence had already won the giant slalom at Oslo in 1952 when she fell in the first run of the slalom. She got up and finished. Then she won the second run by two seconds, a margin that in slalom is close to unheard of, and took the gold. The two victories made her the first American alpine skier to win two gold medals at a single Olympics. She was nineteen, born in Rutland and raised on the slopes of Vermont's Pico Peak.
At the 1924 Chamonix games the American ski jumper Anders Haugen finished fourth, a fraction of a point behind Norway's Thorleif Haug. Fifty years later a Norwegian historian went back over the old scorecards and found that Haug's marks had been added up wrong: they came to 17.821 points, not the 18.000 he had been credited with. Haugen's 17.916 was better. On September 12, 1974, at the age of eighty-five, Haugen was handed his bronze medal in Oslo by Haug's daughter.
Ingemar Stenmark won 86 World Cup races: 46 giant slaloms and 40 slaloms, and nothing else at all. The Swede started a downhill exactly once, on the Streif at Kitzbühel in 1981, and finished thirty-fourth, more than ten seconds behind the winner. He was not trying to win it. The run counted toward the combined, where he placed second. Between 1974 and 1989 he also collected 155 World Cup podiums and two Olympic gold medals, all of it on the strength of turning.
Diana Golden lost her right leg to cancer at twelve, learned to race on one ski, and won ten world championships and nineteen national titles. What she wanted, though, was a start gate in ordinary races. She petitioned the United States Ski Association until it agreed, and the change is still known as the Golden Rule. At the 1988 Calgary games, where disabled skiing ran as a demonstration event, she won the giant slalom; at the Innsbruck Paralympics that year she won two more.
Ester Ledecka went to the 2018 Games as a snowboarder. She entered the super-G anyway, an alpine speed race run on skis, and won it, beating the defending Olympic champion. A week later she won the snowboard parallel giant slalom as well. No woman had won Winter Olympic gold medals in two different sports before, and Ledecka managed both inside a single Games, on equipment that asks two completely different things of the body.
Chloe Kim was not allowed to compete at the 2014 Games. Snowboarding sets a minimum age and she had not reached it, so she stayed home in California and kept riding. Four years later at Pyeongchang she won the halfpipe at seventeen, the youngest woman ever to take an Olympic snowboarding gold. She has since become the first woman to land a 1260 in a halfpipe, three and a half full rotations between takeoff and landing.
Snowboarding entered the Olympics at Nagano in 1998, and Ross Rebagliati of Canada won the first gold, riding the giant slalom through weather that closed in on both runs. Three days later the International Olympic Committee announced a failed drug test and took the medal back. Then came the technicality: the substance was on skiing's banned list but not on the committee's own, and the committee runs the Games. Five days after the race, an arbitration court returned the gold.
The U.S. Virgin Islands sent an alpine skier to the 1988 Calgary Games, and she was fourteen years old. Seba Johnson carried her country's flag into the opening ceremony and raced the giant slalom there, the first Black woman ever to ski at an Olympics and the youngest alpine racer ever to start one. She came back to race again in 1992. A photograph of her on course at a 1989 World Cup is now held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Ski races used to be scored partly on style, the way figure skating still is. In 1922 at Mürren, in Switzerland, an Englishman named Arnold Lunn set pairs of flags down a practice slope, placed them where they would be awkward and unpredictable to reach, and ruled that the fastest skier won, full stop. A fast, ugly turn now beat a slow, pretty one. Every slalom race since has been decided the same way, by a clock rather than a panel.
In 1521 Gustav Eriksson Vasa fled Mora on skis, heading for Norway, and two men from Dalarna chased him down in Sälen and talked him into turning back. He became king of Sweden. Four hundred years later a newspaper editor proposed racing the route in reverse, and on March 19, 1922, one hundred nineteen skiers set out from Sälen. Ernst Alm reached Mora about ninety kilometers later in seven hours, thirty-two minutes and forty-nine seconds.
Nordic combined asks one athlete to do two unrelated things: fly off a ski jump, then race cross-country. Adding the two together used to be arithmetic on a sheet of paper. The Gundersen method turned it into a chase instead. Jumping points become a head start, one point worth four seconds in the individual events, and skiers leave the gate in the order they jumped. Whoever crosses the line first wins. The medal is settled by a finish, not a calculation.
Ski flying is ski jumping with the hill made much larger, and only a handful of such hills exist. One of them is at Vikersund in Norway. In March 2017 the Austrian Stefan Kraft came off it and touched down 253.5 meters away, a little over 831 feet. The record he broke was only hours old: Robert Johansson of Norway had jumped 252 meters on the same hill that day. Kraft's mark then lasted eight years, until Domen Prevc flew 254.5 meters at Planica in March 2025.
Speed skiing has one rule: point the skis straight down a very steep track and hold on. On March 22, 2023, the Frenchman Simon Billy reached 255.5 kilometers an hour on the Chabrières piste at Vars, in the French Alps, which works out to about 159 miles an hour, or seventy meters of hillside every second. The record he broke had belonged to Italy's Ivan Origone since 2016, and Billy's mark still stands as the fastest anyone has skied.
Skis were transport long before they were sport, and they did not turn well. Around 1860 Sondre Norheim, of Morgedal in Norway, held his heels down with stiff willow bands and shaped the sides of his skis into a curve, and suddenly a ski could be steered. The turns he pioneered took the names of his region and his capital: telemark and christiania. Norheim left Norway in middle age and died in 1897 in Denbigh, North Dakota, about as flat a place as America offers.
Freestyle skiing grew out of the hot-dogging of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Olympic movement kept it at arm's length for years. At Calgary in 1988, moguls, aerials and ski ballet were all run as demonstrations, with no medals attached. Moguls went first: at Albertville in 1992 it became freestyle skiing's first full medal event, a run down a field of bumps judged on turns, jumps and speed together. Today the weighting is sixty percent turns, twenty percent jumps and twenty percent speed. Aerials followed in 1994.
For two Winter Games, skiers performed choreographed routines to music on a gentle slope. Ski ballet was one of three freestyle disciplines demonstrated at Calgary in 1988, alongside moguls and aerials, and it came back as a demonstration four years later. Unlike the other two, it never won medal status. Competition dwindled and then stopped altogether, which makes ski ballet one of the few sports the Olympics auditioned twice and then declined to keep.
Racing down a hill in a pack, over jumps and banked turns, reached skiing secondhand. Snowboarders got there first, in the event they still call boardercross: snowboard cross joined the Olympic program at Turin in 2006, and skiers took up the same format as ski cross at Vancouver in 2010. The halfpipe traveled the same route. Snowboarders competed in one at Nagano in 1998, and freeskiers got an Olympic halfpipe of their own sixteen years later, at Sochi.
Union Pacific wanted skiers riding its trains to Idaho, so it built a resort at Sun Valley and needed a way up the hill. A young engineer named Jim Curran had worked on a system for loading bunches of bananas onto boats, hanging them from hooks on a moving cable. He replaced the hooks with chairs. Crews tested the idea in the Omaha rail yards, using men on roller skates in place of skiers, and in December 1936 the world's first chairlift opened.
Alpine villages were summer places; in winter the hotels closed. The story St. Moritz tells is that in the autumn of 1864 the hotelier Johannes Badrutt wagered a group of English summer guests that they would enjoy his valley in winter, and offered to pay their fare home if they did not. They came, stayed until Easter, and told everyone. What is certain is that the winter season took hold there, and the Alps have not shut in January since.
In 1942 the Army built Camp Hale in the Colorado mountains to train soldiers who could fight on skis. The recruiting was handled by an unlikely agency: the National Ski Patrol, founded four years earlier by Charles Minot Dole, which screened skiers and climbers for the 10th Mountain Division. When the war ended, the veterans went back to the mountains, this time for a living. Former members of the division helped start Vail, Aspen, Arapahoe Basin, Sugarbush and Whiteface.
Every other alpine world championship has been staged in the northern winter. In 1966 the races went to Portillo, a lodge high in the Chilean Andes, which put them in the middle of the Southern Hemisphere's season and the Northern Hemisphere's summer. It remains the only time the championships have been held in South America. Ever since, national teams have flown to Chile during their own off-season to train on real snow while the Alps are green.
Timberline Lodge sits at six thousand feet on Mount Hood in Oregon, and it exists because people needed work. More than five hundred workers built and furnished it through the Works Progress Administration, finishing in eighteen months. President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated it on September 28, 1937, calling the building a monument to the skill and faithful performance of workers. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1977, and the Palmer chairlift, opened in 1978, made summer skiing possible.
Before 1934, everyone in America who skied downhill walked back up. That winter, on a farm hillside in Woodstock, Vermont, a loop of rope was strung around pulleys and spun by the engine of a Ford Model T. Skiers grabbed hold and were hauled to the top. It was the first rope tow in America, the start of lift-served skiing in this country. A sign marks the spot today, on land that links the Appalachian Trail to a national park.
Mad River Glen in Vermont opened in December 1948 with a chairlift one seat wide, and a single chair still carries skiers up General Stark Mountain. In 1995 the skiers who loved the place formed a cooperative and bought the mountain from its owner. Shares cost twenty-five hundred dollars, and in October 2025 the roster reached its cap of twenty-five hundred shareholders. America's only skier-owned major mountain is run like a town meeting: its owners voted 1,214 to 11 to buy the land next door.
The Streif at Kitzbühel drops 860 meters over a course only 3,312 meters long, and the worst of it comes early. About eight seconds after the start, racers reach a pitch called the Mausefalle, the mousetrap, where they fly as far as eighty meters off the lip and land on a slope that falls away at an eighty-five percent gradient. A turn just below, the Karussell, pulls 3.1 g. Near the bottom, on the last jump, they hit speeds of up to 150 kilometers an hour.
On November 1, 2005, a ski slope opened inside the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai. Ski Dubai holds twenty-two thousand five hundred square meters of snow, kept between minus one and two degrees Celsius all year round, with a longest run of about four hundred meters beneath an indoor peak eighty-five meters high. In 2012 ten gentoo and ten king penguins arrived from SeaWorld in San Antonio, and they now share the hill with the skiers.
In the autumn of 1924, men digging a drainage ditch through a bog near Kalvträsk, in northern Sweden, struck wood about a meter and a half down. What they pulled out was a pair of skis and a shovel-shaped pole just over five feet long. Carbon dating put the wood at somewhere between 5,200 and 5,400 years old. The original is kept at the Västerbottens museum in Umeå, and the museum in Skellefteå, nearer the bog the skis came out of, displays a copy.
In the Altai Mountains of northwestern China, skis are still made the old way: red pine or birch for the board, with horsehide over the base. The hair comes from the forelegs of horses more than three years old, all of it lying the same direction, so the ski slides forward easily and grips when it starts to slip backward. The skin goes on wet, dries hard and is tacked down along the edges with small nails. A pair takes about fifteen days and six to ten pieces of hide.
Norway in 1206 was split by civil war, and the infant Haakon Haakonsson was in danger. Two Birkebeiner men, Torstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukka, carried him on skis over the mountains between Gudbrandsdalen and Østerdalen in midwinter. He grew up to be King Haakon IV. Since 1932 skiers have raced the same crossing; the first field of 147 men covered fifty-nine kilometers, and every racer since has carried a weighted pack standing in for the child.
In 1888 Fridtjof Nansen and five companions crossed the Greenland ice cap on skis. They started from the empty east coast and headed for the settled west, on purpose, so that turning back would not be an option. The traverse took forty-one days. Two of the six were Sami, Samuel Balto and Ole Ravna. The party wintered at Godthaab, now Nuuk, and did not reach home in Christiania until May 30, 1889, where a crowd was waiting.
Every winter for twenty years, John Thompson crossed the Sierra Nevada on skis he had made himself, carrying mail between Placerville, California, and Genoa, in what is now Nevada. He went out in three days and came back in two, with a pack that ran from sixty pounds to a hundred. Norwegian-born, he was known as Snowshoe. He never held a government contract and the government never paid him for the mail; when he traveled to Washington in 1872 to ask, he was turned down.
Early bindings clamped a boot to the ski and held on, which is why a twisting fall could break a leg. Hjalmar Hvam, a Norwegian-born racer in Oregon who had won a national Nordic combined title in 1932, broke his leg on the same Mount Hood slope in 1937 and again in 1938. By 1939 he had worked out a pronged, triangular toe piece that pivoted, letting the boot come free before the leg gave way. He called it the Saf-Ski, and the first ones built in quantity went to the Army's 10th Mountain Division.
7The engineer who rebuilt the ski, then the racket
On the tile: Howard Head1950
Howard Head went skiing for the first time in 1947, disliked the long hickory skis of the day, and decided he could do better with what he already knew. He was an aircraft engineer at the Glenn L. Martin Company, so he built a ski the way a wing is built: a plywood core sandwiched between sheets of aluminum, with steel sidewalls and a plastic laminate on the outside. By 1955 his skis were the leading brand in Europe and North America. Years later he did the same to tennis, with the oversize racket Prince sold from 1976.
On Christmas morning in 1965 in Muskegon, Michigan, Sherman Poppen's wife Nancy told him to get their daughters out of the house. A sled cut through the snow and stuck in the sand below, so he took ten-year-old Wendy's child-size skis and braced the pair together with wooden crossbars, making something a child could stand on and ride. Nancy named it: a Snurfer, snow plus surfer. By Christmas 1968 Brunswick, a bowling company with a plant in town, was building them out of bowling-lane laminate.
Jake Burton Carpenter had ridden a Snurfer as a boy in the 1960s. In 1977, at twenty-three, he put his savings, a bank loan and an inheritance from his grandmother, a hundred thousand dollars in all, into a farmhouse near Stratton Mountain, Vermont, converted into a factory that could turn out fifty wooden boards a day. It was instant overcapacity: in 1979 he sold three hundred, about six days of production. Most ski areas would not sell a lift ticket to anyone on a snowboard. Breckenridge and Stratton were the exceptions.