Two Planks and a Passion by Roland Huntford

Author:Roland Huntford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Reading and Writing Virgil’s Eclogues
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2008-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

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Mathias Zdarsky

Mathias Zdarsky was the true father of Alpine skiing. Another unsettled subject of the patchwork Habsburg empire, he came from a German-speaking enclave in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic. The tenth child of a miller, he studied painting and sculpture in Munich, before training as an engineer at the Polytechnicum in Zürich. He was an accomplished gymnast, and claimed to be ‘familiar with most sports’.1 In 1889, at the age of 33, he withdrew to Habernreith, a farm he had acquired at Lilienfeld, at the edge of the Alps near Vienna; ‘to my mountain isolation’, as he put it, ‘to live according to my scientific [and] artistic ideas undisturbed’. He certainly looked the part. Tall, thin, ramrod-straight and unsmiling, a hermit with no domestic help, he was thought to be a crank. In a childhood accident, he had lost the sight of his left eye and through the other, like one-eyed Wotan, he stared out bleakly upon the world.

When the German translation of Nansen’s book on the crossing of Greenland appeared in 1891 Zdarsky, like so many others, admitted that ‘Nansen fever gripped me too’,2 although in his case the outcome was perverse. With plenty of snow at Lilienfeld, he ordered a pair of skis from Norway. When they arrived, he put them on immediately outside the post office. He had never seen a ski before. On the flat, he managed more or less but as soon as he started climbing to Habernreith, understandably he floundered. Habernreith, in Zdarsky’s own words, ‘had very steep difficult terrain with gradients of up to 58 degrees (measured by surveying instruments)’. It was hardly suited to these skis. They were not of the Telemark model. Nearly 3 m long, they resembled rather a Swedish or Finnish type adapted to flat terrain. Turning was out of the question.

After this fiasco, Zdarsky instantly damned Norwegian skiing as useless in the Alps. He decided to invent a new system of his own. His sole aim was mastery of a true Alpine slope – more than 35° to the horizontal. Behind this lay his personal philosophy. ‘The enjoyment of Nature in her wintry garb’, he declared, ‘is a source … of recreation, strength, and health-giving for body and soul.’3 He wanted this not only for an elite, but everyone, ‘whether man or woman, young or old, rich or poor’.4

The obstacle was what Zdarsky called ‘the … evil of the modern Norwegian skiing technique’.

It needs a long time to learn. “One must ski from childhood if one wants to attain mastery!” This [is a] drawback … Top performance can never be the common property of all the people.5

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