Alpine skiing is one of the core sports on today’s Winter Olympic program, but it wasn’t even an event at the very first Winter Olympics at Chamonix in 1924. It’s almost surprising that at the time, the sport of alpine skiing was not that old.
At the first Games, the only skiing that mattered was cross-country, ski jumping, and Nordic combined. The drama started before athletes ever set foot on the terrain at Chamonix, as qualifications in the US had plenty of issues.
However, skiing at Chamonix also had its own drama, as Mother Nature proved to wreak havoc on the terrain, providing an incredibly difficult competitive landscape that would prove to be truly Olympic.
Take a glimpse at some of the ski events:
Skiing competitions at Chamonix also had some interesting legacies. Unfortunately, officials made a mistake that led to a surprise podium correction decades later. Also, one of the stars addition errors led to a situation that no official wants to see, and a podium winner here went on to be a major force in ski technology.
Listen to the episode to hear the full story!
Sources for this episode include:
Barnes-Montblanc: https://www.barnes-montblanc.com/en/news/to-do-in-chamonix-11/cable-car-aiguille-du-midi-118
France-Amerique: https://france-amerique.com/chamonix-1924-inventing-the-winter-olympics
New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/1924/02/18/archives/haugen-sets-record-on-briarcliff-course-us-olympic-ski-team-captain.html
Olympics.com:
https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/chamonix-1924/results/ski-jumping/normal-hill-individual-men
https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/chamonix-1924/results/nordic-combined/individual-men
https://olympics.com/en/video/haug-thorleif-1924w
Olympedia:
https://www.olympedia.org/editions/29/sports/CCS
https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/95850
PatentlyInteresting.com: http://www.patentlyinteresting.com/an-olympian-inventor.html
Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/802177/medal-table-country-winter-olympics-ski-jumping/
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This is an uncorrected machine-generated transcript and may contain errors. Please check its accuracy against the audio. Do not quote from the transcript; use the audio as the record of note.
7-Chamonix 1924-Oct 2024
Jill: Hello, Olympics and Paralympics fans, and welcome to Keep the Flame Alive’s Games History Moment, where we look at past editions of the Games. All year long, we will be looking at Chamonix 1924, which is billed as the first Winter Olympic Games. It’s celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2024. So we’ve got a lot to explore at how.
This all went down. I am your host Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co host Alison Brown. Alison, hello, bonjour.
Alison: Bonjour, bienvenue à Chamonix. Brush off what little French stuck after we escaped from Paris. But yeah, so we have, we, we took a little hiatus during our Paris adventure from Chamonix, but we are back and we’ve got skiing on the docket for today.
Because there was, there was a good amount of skiing, but not the skiing that you would expect. So, skiing events in Chamonix were limited to cross country ski jumping and Nordic combined. So we’ve got
Jill: No downhill.
Alison: No alpine at all. The first slalom skiing competition that’s been recorded was only held in 1922.
Oh. So alpine skiing as a competitive program was pretty brand new. No. No. By the time 24 came around, Alpine events didn’t make a debut until 1936. Whoa! Right, because we think of downhill and slalom events as the cornerstone of Winter Olympics. Yes! Nope! So there were 24, with no Alpine events.
Jill: Wow.
Alison: All right.
So two seconds in and you’re already mind blown. So cross country skiing included two events, the 18 kilometer and the 50 kilometer. And of course only for men because women had very little to do in 1924. Uh, ski jumping had one event. I saw it in different places called both the individual normal hill and the individual large hill.
It was just smaller than either of the events that we deal with today. So I think different, different people called it a different thing, but they had one ski jumping event. And Norda combined included a jump and a 50 kilometer cross country race similar to today. But unlike today, the race came first and then the jump was second.
Oh, interesting. The most confusing thing about this was when things happened and what happened simultaneously. So that’s why we’re kind of going to talk about all of these events at the same time. Lots of people competed in all three, and we had some matching podiums. So the drama of this started before the Olympics even opened.
American skiers had no snow for their qualifying competition. It was set to be held in Briarcliff Manor, New York, which is now just a suburb of New York City. But at the time, it was kind of a Hudson Valley outpost. It’s like 15 minutes from where I grew up, and you would never think of today’s Briarcliff Manor as having any kind of ski competition.
Wow! So, they shipped a half a million cubic feet of snow by train from the Adirondack Mountains. What?! I know, if you’re unfamiliar with New York geography, this doesn’t sound like it’s far away. But it’s several hours even with today’s highways to get up to the Adirondacks from a suburb of New York City.
And at the time, yeah, you had train travel, but this was no joke to take these refrigerated cars of snow. Why they didn’t just move the competition, I don’t know. I know I see that question forming on your face. I don’t know. I’m sure it was, There was some glamour to having this competition and just moving it, say, up to Lake Placid or up to an existing snowy area.
No, we’re keeping it in Briarcliff.
France, on the other hand, had the opposite problem. We talked a lot in our Chamonix shows about the weather. there was a storm about two weeks before, the International Winter Festival was supposed to begin. Dropped six feet of snow on the mountain in Chamonix in a single day. Whoa. So the French army was called in and locals all banded together and they got the trails ready in time for this competition.
I don’t know how, given the state of the equipment that they were using at the time, they managed to do this, but can you imagine the army just shows up with shovels, I guess, and search dogs? I don’t, there was very little detail on exactly how it was done, but it got done. And so these races happened according to the schedule.
that was not the only amazing thing that Chamonix managed to pull off for its skiing event. organizers built a cable car to bring spectators up to the mountain. And the funicular linked the pelerine to La Para, and it later became the first section of the famous Alguil de Midi cable car. Oh.
Which is this, that was built mostly in the 1950s, but did use this section that was built for 1924. At the time, it was the highest elevation cable car in the world. Wow, engineering had to go on for that. You know what? The engineering that the French pulled off on these games, I mean, give, we talked, when we talked about ice skating, they made this enormous ice lake and all these things that they managed to do.
And yet the French team was felled by the flu in their military dorm. So you really see that 1920s pivot point of modern engineering and old world engineering. Problems still coming together. So getting back to the competition to no one’s surprise, the Norwegians dominated these events, winning five medals in cross country and sweeping the Nordic combined podium.
Technically, however, the 18 kilometer cross country podium should have looked different. This from what I could tell, and if there are historians out there who are going to correct me, please do because I found a lot of conflicting information on this. The ski portion of the Nordic combined and the 18 kilometer cross country race were on the same day and may have been run simultaneously.
Whoa. It was unclear given the timing. If they were actually running it at the same time, because the top two finishers Torleif Hogg and Johan Gratas Praten. We’re only entered in the Nordic combined event and not listed as entrance in the 18 kilometer event. But they were still awarded the gold and silver medals of the 18 kilometer event.
That’s weird. And I think because those two portions were running at the same time. So they won. Even though they kept skiing, they kept skiing, but they really were only supposed to be racing in the Nordic combined, but you just had everybody on the course at the same time. One, one article I read though, I found no further evidence of this, but I hope it’s true because it’s just a great little story mentioned that the mistake was discovered at the time, but Finland’s Tapani Nuka refused to be upgraded from the bronze for the 18 kilometer saying, I didn’t win.
They beat me. So even just because of this technical issue, they should still be awarded the gold and silver and I should get the bronze. Which, which, wait, that doesn’t make sense because they weren’t in your race. But they were racing together. And so they still beat him on the 18 kilometer course.
Jill: you know, I get it, but I kind of want to tell him they weren’t in your, your competition. So they were like the other people, you were the winner, unless you were pacing
Alison: off. I don’t know. I, you know, it’s, it is confusing. And so much of early Olympic history, we see things like this, like, Oh, I just decided to run the marathon today and ended up winning a medal.
So, Nico, it was, he did all right for himself. He was a star of Finnish skiing in the early twenties. And according to Olympedia, he received a state funeral when he died in 1989 at the age of 94. So I hope that whole story is true because he sounds just like an amazing human being, so I want that to be true.
I’m just gonna manifest that out there. Like with so many other events in Chamonix, the 50 kilometer race had very difficult weather conditions. It was cold, the course had melted and refrozen, so it was rutted and icy. 22 racers either did not start or did not finish. Wow. Only 21 racers did finish. Oh, gold medal went to Thorleaf Hogg.
He finished in three hours and 44 minutes, 32 seconds. The last skier across the line was Czespan Witkowski from Poland, and he finished in just under six and a half hours. Six and a half hours. Wow. And that distance today, a 50 kilometer race. Hour and change is what you would expect. So yeah, lots happened to cross country in the past hundred years.
Jill: Wow. Holy cow. Can you imagine just like, no, we still got somebody on the track. They’re still out there. Can you imagine skiing for six and a half hours in a race? I, maybe he stopped for a snack and a, you know, like, I need a break.
Alison: It’s a long race. The podium for the Nordic combined event matched the 50 kilometer cross country.
Nice. All from Norway. Gold to Thorleif Haag, silver to Thoralf Stromstedt, and the bronze to then Johan Grotesbroden. I realize I am destroying these Norwegian names and I do apologize. they have the, all the crazy Norwegian letters involved and I don’t know how to pronounce those. So I apologize.
Now we get to ski jumping, which is so much fun. It’s the best story of. I, this is my favorite story that we have come across. Oh, wow. And that’s saying a lot. So the gold medalist in ski jumping, Jacob Tillen Thoms became the second person to win medals at both the Winter and Summer Olympics. Oh. In 1936, he won silver as part of the Norwegian eight meter sailing team.
Interesting. Silver medalist Narve Bona had an inconsistent athletic career, but he had an effect on skiing in a profound way. He founded the Llamadalen Ski Factory and Bona skis were the gold standard in the fifties and sixties for skiing. uh, Bona was the first to manufacture fiberglass touring skis in 1959.
an enormous jump from the wooden skis that were used prior. So without Bona, we wouldn’t have had a lot of these, , engineering advancements in ski technology.
Jill: Wow, that’s interesting.
Alison: So Thorleif Haag was unquestionably the skiing star in Chamonix. Along with his three gold medals, he also was awarded the bronze medal in ski jumping.
Notice I said he was awarded the bronze medal. Yeah, what happened? He didn’t really win the bronze medal in ski jumping. American Anders Hagen, who had been born in Telemark, Norway,
Jill: of the Telemark Landing,
Alison: of the Telemark Landing, jumped the furthest. But a mistake on his landing put him in fourth place.
Or did it? In the mid 70s, , the double silver medalist, Thorolf Stromstedt, contacted sports historian Jakob Vog and asked him to research a potential mistake in the scoring. Yep, they had made a mistake basically in adding up the scores. And a simple mathematical mistake had cost the American the bronze medal.
Jill: Did they ever fix it?
Alison: They did fix it. In 1974, Hoggan was flown to Oslo and received the bronze medal from Hogg’s daughter, Anna Maria Hogg Magnuson. Hogg had died in 1934 at only 40 years old from pneumonia. Whoa. This one medal in ski jumping is all the United States has ever won in ski jumping.
And didn’t win it for 50 years, but that was awarded. And Norway, on the other hand. 36.
So yeah, if you look at a lot of the articles from 1974, when he flew over, it was a big deal. It was made a big deal and he got pomp and ceremony and he was excited to go back home where he had been born. He had emigrated to the United States as a child and then he got to go back to Norway and get this medal that he thought he had won, but real, you know, just sort of said, okay, the judges know what they’re doing, but they really didn’t.
Jill: Wow. That is amazing. Well, let’s give a shout out to our sources.
Alison: Absolutely. France Amerique, New York Times, Barnes Montblanc, ESPN, olympics. com, Olympedia, patentlyinteresting. com, and Statista.
Jill: Excellent. So you can check out the expanded show notes at flamealivepod. com for more information. Thank you so much for listening.
And until next time, keep the flame alive.