There was only a starting line and a finishing line with no gates in between. Before the race was over, eleven skis had been broken, four racers had broken legs, two racers broke arms, and one racer broke his back.

Over the years downhill racing has changed, of course. Today courses are packed and control gates have been added through which racers must pass. Gradually finishing times have gotten closer and closer as racer’s skills and conditioning have improved. Today, tens of thousands of dollars are spent and many weeks are taken to prepare a course prior to its use. And the time of the tenth-place finisher is sometimes less than one second behind the winner.

The racecourses we see now are full of long jumps and scary looking high-speed turns. From a television camera point of view, all of the racers look identical. They race by at speeds that are sometimes over eighty miles an hour in colorful masks, and they wear what looks like dark, silk, long underwear that is covered with dozens of each racer’s sponsors’ advertisements.

Skier Cross
To make the races look more exciting on television, someone came up with the idea of making a racecourse on which four racers could try and negotiate the course at the same time. The course is full of banked turns and big jumps, and within the last few years the cross has already become an Olympic event.

The Skier Cross discipline is exciting to watch as the racers cut corners and occasionally pass each other. In nine out of ten races, the person who is first around the first gate is the eventual winner. It is wild to watch the athletes skiing or snowboarding at high speed, making turns on an icy course just inches away from each other. Press accounts indicate there is a lot of appeal in the sport. Here is a recent report from the Aspen Times:
"Most of the bad wrecks came in the quarter and semi finals. In one women’s semifinal, all three leaders lost control on the jump, including two- time champion Karin Huttary who came down with a thud on her right side. Medical personnel attended her for about ten minutes before strapping her to a sled and taking her to the hospital for hip and knee injuries.
“The men had it just as bad with three racers crashing on the same jump in one quarterfinal, including Lar Lewen who had to be helped off the mountain to a hospital where he was evaluated for head trauma. Juha Haukkala crashed on the same jump in the next quarter final and was also taken to the hospital for a head injury."

Oddly enough, the men liked the course because it had a jump with a 50-foot gap and the landing area was 24-feet higher than the take off. In the middle of all of the carnage, Daron Rhalves who has won 12 World Cup races, won this race by almost half of a ski length.

Ring of Fire?
Next winter there is talk of having a giant ring of fire partway down the racecourse in order to provide a new challenge. The heat of the fire will radically change the snow conditions, e.g., it will introduce challenges in technical, layer waxing as well as how to keep goggles from fogging up as racers try to fly through the ring of fire.

I was thinking about all this last winter as I gently flew through the air on a quad chairlift at the same height that these racers fly through the air on their way to fame and glory, or maybe a few days in a hospital bed. In some respects, certain types of downhill racing are already approaching the carnage that occurred in ski racing 1934. The only difference is that television cameras now record every gory detail of every wreck and then show it in ultra-slow-motion.

Are you raising your kid to be a ski racer?

Editor’s Note: This is one in a Tahoetopia series written by Warren Miller, legendary ski cinematographer. For other columns by Warren, see the Warren Miller section of tahoetopia.com.