PSIA-AASI

7.28.2010

The 50/50 Blog: Teaching & Technique

Timeless piece of safety advice: “The expert is the man who does not fall and the man who does not fall does not get hurt.”

Published more than 20 years ago, in 1987 and again in 1989 by the Eastern Professional Ski Instructors Association, E. John B. Allen’s Teaching & Technique: A History of American Ski Instruction can all too easily be considered a snapshot of a single era, with little relevance to modern snowsports.

After all, snowboards, shaped skis, high-speed chairlifts, rocker, and halfpipes are all still lurking beyond the last page, as sure and game-changingly inevitable as cellphones and the internet. And Allen, an academic who published the exhaustively researched The Culture and Sport of Skiing in 2007, doesn’t aim for the half-engaged reader, with his extensive use of period quotes and precise footnotes.

Which is why it’s all the more remarkable how well the book does read, with vivid portraits of the history of instruction in the U.S., and also timeless observations and sometimes surprising wit.

Allen makes his own argument for knowing one’s history in the preface, noting, “It seems ever more important that before instructors begin to teach others how to ski, they should know the techniques and teaching attitudes of the past; it is from the foundation of historical understanding that present problems and future prospects may be better analyzed.”

He then proceeds—in only 58 pages of actual text!—to race from the first professional ski instructor’s certification exam in 1938, to 1982, when snowsports instructional icon Horst Abraham was just preparing to publish his own masterpiece of winter learning, Skiing Right. Along the way, he takes us from Norway in the 1700s to St. Anton in the 1900s, when Hannes Schneider began to teach Austrian troops what would become known as the Arlberg Technique.

Back in the U.S., Allen explores Schneider’s long lasting impact on American skiing, including his memorable quote: “I am going to put speed into everyone’s skiing, and I am going to make it reasonably safe. It’s speed, not touring, that is the lure.”

As Allen notes, “He was right.”

Of course, there were also the Swiss, the Scandinavian telemark, and French-based “parallel technique.” There was jumping, herring-boning, and the seemingly wide-held belief that you couldn’t possibly be capable of teaching skiing without the benefit of a thick European accent.

But, as has been stated before on this blog, and is also clearly spelled out in the book, America is the melting pot. And that melting of styles and techniques into a pure, simple, direct concept of instruction is what is at the heart of Allen’s story. From Peckett’s Inn at Sugar Hill, to Alta to that famed day in Whitefish, Mt., in 1961 when PSIA was finally officially formed, Allen makes good copy out of all of the ideas, innovations, and politics that stir the conversation around U.S. snowsports.

He invokes the names of PSIA legends such as Abraham and Bill Lash, as well as celebrity cheerleaders for the sport like Lowell Thomas. He also remembers perhaps slightly lesser known luminaries like Dorothy Hoyt Nebel, the Eastern Downhill and Slalom Champion in 1940 and 1941 who said all the European techniques couldn’t merge here at first, because, “We had no American technique into which they could be melted.”

Of particular pleasure to this reader, Allen also continually unearths the minutiae of skiing, recounting gymnasiums full of skiers in the 1930s tuning up for the slopes to piano accompaniment, avalanche safety awareness and telemark turns being required for early certification classes, and this timeless piece of safety advice: “The expert is the man who does not fall and the man who does not fall does not get hurt.”

Hopefully you’ve got a good friend who may still have a copy of this book to loan out for a quick read on a fall night. I just tracked down a single copy on Amazon.com, retailing for $80 bucks. Many thanks to former PSIA-AASI Board President Ray Allard for loaning me his copy—Ray, I promise to give it back!

-Peter Kray