Olympic alpine racing dates only to 1936
Alpine or downhill skiing means sliding snow slopes on skis with heels locked to the binding, unlike free-heel Nordic styles. Off-piste adventurers may ride snowmobiles, helicopters, or snowcats to remote starts. Winter Olympic alpine events began in 1936; modern slalom roots reach an 1880s Oslo contest.
Around 55 million people skied downhill as of 2023, with Europe the heartland, followed by Japan and the United States; a 1996 count put the world's ski areas at 4,500 with 26,000 lifts. Skiing itself is prehistoric. Wooden planks of many shapes survive in peat bogs in Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, first used to cross frozen marshes, and the word comes from Old Norse skíð, a split piece of wood. Gold-rush miners in California's Lost Sierra learned from Norwegians, strapping on boards 10 to 14 feet long to deliver mail and staging some of the Western Hemisphere's first races in the 1850s.
The Norwegian Sondre Norheim shaped skis with curved sides, fixed heels with willow bands, and won what is reported as the first downhill contest in Oslo in 1868, astonishing onlookers with the stem christie turn. Slalom comes from Telemark dialect: sla, a slope, and låm, a track, with the steepest runs called wild trails. Races there began on a mountainside, ran down logging slides and ended with a sharp turn on a field or frozen lake.
Pointing straight down the fall line gives the maximum speed a slope allows, so skiers control pace by angling across it. Beginners learn the snowplough, pressing on one ski's inner edge to steer. The stem turn angles one ski's tail outward so the snow pushes back, and stemming both only brakes. Carving lets a ski's sidecut bend it into an arc when rolled on edge, and modern shaped skis built for this have changed greatly since the 1980s. Bindings are designed to release in a fall, and boots evolved from low laced leather to tall buckled plastic as injuries mounted.
Top racers compete in the FIS World Cup, World Championships and the Olympics across slalom, giant slalom, super-G, downhill and combined. Slalom skiers wear shin, arm and chin guards against the gates. Winning slalom, giant slalom and downhill all in one season or one Olympics, the triple crown, has been done by only two people.
Source: Alpine skiing
