When you sit down next weekend (13 February) to watch the first competitors blast through the starting gate of the men’s downhill, the blue riband event of this year’s Winter Olympics in Whistler, I hope you will spare a moment to think back to a clear but windy day in Switzerland more than 80 years ago. It was in the early morning of 29 January 1928 that a group of passionate British skiers, 13 men and four women, and all members of the illustrious ski racing club, the Kandahar, set out from the village of Murren in the Bernese Oberland. Their target was the 10,000 foot summit of the Schilthorn, well over 5,000 feet above them.
There were no lifts or tows then, so setting off in their collars and ties (and scarves and breeches for the ladies) they put sealskins on their hugely long 2.4m hickory skis and slid uphill through the deep unmarked snow, against the peerless backdrop of the Eiger, the Monch and the Jungfrau. Several exhausting hours later they arrived at the summit, ate a quick sandwich, then removed their skins, and on a signal set off in a mass start to see who would get first to Lauterbrunnen, 14 kilometres and 2,100 metres below. It was, I like to think, the birth of downhill ski racing, though it was to be another 20 years before the downhill became an Olympic event, at St Moritz.
That Murren race was known as the Inferno, and it is now the most popular amateur downhill ski race in the world. The Kandahar, having bequeathed this great race to the world, no longer runs it — that’s down to the fine people of Murren itself now — but more than 100 members of the club take part each year.
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