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. That first was won by Harold Mitchell in 72 minutes; now the winning time is about a fifth of that.
As with so much that is great in world sport, the pioneering British got there first. And in a fascinating little volume, The Inferno Story, by Andrew Morgan, himself a triple Olympic skier for Britain, the extraordinary history of the race, the Kandahar Club, and a very British corner of the Alps, is laid out in all its glory.
It is a tale packed with extraordinary characters, like Jimmy Riddell, a brilliant schoolboy athlete from Harrow, who won in 1929, shaving 27 minutes off the previous year’s winning time. Riddell went on to break 80mph and jump 50 metres on skis in St Moritz, skied for Britain in the Garmisch Olympics of 1936, flew to Australia in a two-seater plane with Neville Shute, wrote books, and died recently at the age of 90. Another Kandahar ace was Christopher Mackintosh, who competed in the long jump in the Chariots of Fire Olympics, played rugby for Oxford and Scotland, scored countless centuries as a schoolboy cricketer, cruised the Inferno, became world bobsleigh champion in 1937 and of whom it was said, ‘no woman ever refused him’. I’m not surprised either. Even Monty, a keen skier himself and past president of the Kandahar, gets a look-in for developing the role of army teams in the postwar years.
Now the Kandahar — whose motto, roughly translated, is ‘Don’t turn unless you have to’ — is in the care of the imposingly monikered Cleeves Palmer, quite one of the most engaging men you could meet, who as well as being a fierce racer has done a great deal to develop the club’s youth training programmes. He did last month’s Inferno, a 10km run to Winteregg, with three sharp uphill sections, in just over nine minutes. The spirit of amateur ski racing is alive and well in Murren, and it is as much a part of this great sport as the superb athletes you will watch next week in Whistler.
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