Medals for downhill skiing boost skiing in Switzerland
Published: Wednesday, Dec 27th 2023, 10:20
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The two Olympic medal winners Bernhard Russi and Roland Collombin are not entirely uninvolved in the enthusiasm for skiing in Switzerland. In 1972, the same year that they won the gold and silver medals in the downhill at the Olympic Games in Sapporo (Japan), the organization Jugend+Sport was founded, which financed ski camps in schools and ski clubs, among other things.
Swiss athletes were still successful on the slopes 15 years later. In 1987, they won 14 medals at the Alpine World Ski Championships in Crans Montana.
At the end of the 1980s, almost 90 percent of Swiss men and women skied: "Even if half days of cross-country skiing are included to arrive at this figure," admitted sports historian Grégory Quin when asked by the Keystone-SDA news agency.
"In the winter of 82-83, skiing in Switzerland was cheaper than ever before," said the researcher. According to the study, the cost of skiing fell between the 1950s and 1980s and has been rising again since then.
The middle class conquers the slopes
The democratization of skiing reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s. Between 1965 and 1980, the middle class took the slopes by storm: "Going skiing became an identity-forming activity; you had to have been there," says the historian. And practically all children learned the sport in ski camps at school.
They benefit from the infrastructure that was built decades earlier: After the Second World War, chairlifts replaced ski lifts, followed by cable cars from the end of the 1940s.
In the 1930s, the first ski lift infrastructures were built near the large hotels in Davos (1934) and St. Moritz (1935). These were often "rudimentary" ski lifts financed by the hoteliers.
Previously, skiers had used funiculars and cog railroads, which began to be used in winter, such as the Gornergratbahn in Zermatt from 1928.
Bitter future for skiing
Before that time, skiers climbed up on foot, spent the night in a hut and skied back down the next day. "That's why ski clubs still have huts in the mountains today," says the historian.
And the future of skiing? "At the end of the century, it will hardly be possible to ski," said Quin. "There will probably be snow at an altitude of over 3,000 meters, but it will be difficult to ski there because there will only be rocks."
©Keystone/SDA
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