This article is not about data science but history, and one that came out of sheer curiosity that I thought I’d share. I started skiing at the age of 3 at the station in the Alps called the “Sept Laux” next to Grenoble, France. It was natural to me, but until now I never wondered for how long people have done it. Here is a brief history of how it all began.
The word ski comes from old Norse, a germanic language that was spoken in Scandinavia from the 8th to the late 14th century. The word slalom comes from a scandinavian language as well, Norwegian, showing the important part scandinavia played in the establishment of the sport. While modern skiing is for the pleasure of the sport, it started as a very practical way to get around quicker in places where the snow was present for a very long time and therefore more compact because the weather was stable, and wasn’t thought proper for anything but gentle slopes. Although modern skiing came to us from Scandinavia, skiing was a practice accross Russia and all the way to the China border. As a biologist, I would tend to think it is more likely the invention was done somewhere and then spread , but it is possible the system was invented in several places (recalling the common ancestor vs convergent evolution in biology), but there is no way of knwowing right now. The earliest suggestion of skiing comes from drawings in France at the time of the cro-magnon humans, 20000 years ago. The oldest fragments of skis found date back from 8000 years ago in Russia and were excavated by a Ukrainian archeologist, Gregoryi Burov in the 1960s. There were younger fragments found which showed the use of animal skin, and written evidence found in China dating back to 2200 years ago. The norwegians appear to be the first ones to seek to modernize it and make it a sport in the mid 19th century when they organized cross-country skiing and jumping competitions. The first officially recognized modern skiing race 4 km was in Switzerland in 1910 although reports of downhill races happened in Austria earlier. Unsurprisingly, the installation of tows to prevent from having to carry skis up the slopes helped make it more popular. One of the first tows was invented by an innkeeper Robert smth and was water-powered and pulled a rope around a wheel up the slope to pull the skier. Ski schools and competitions, particularly the winter Olympics helped promote skiing and with it came an entire industry in fashion, equipment, transport and lodging to the slopes. The two World Wars affected the skiing industry, but afterwards it became very popular, and the fast improvement of skiing equipment meant that races were faster and faster, and records of speed were broken often, giving even more visibility and prestige to the sport. As usual, women were authorized to compete late into history, for instance women’s jumping was not allowed at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics even though they have been in the sport since 1930s.
Sources:
-
Scandinavian Ski Terminology and Its Dialectal Distribution, Arnold Dalen, Dialectologia et Geolinguistica, Volume 1999, Issue 7, 9–26
-
Der Schneehase Nummer 38 Published on May 21, 2013
-
Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing - Roland Huntford
This was less science and more history, but most science teachers will start with the history of a discovery, which they consider the best way to understand things. What was your favorite moment in ski history? If you liked this article please share it with other sciathletes! See you next time!