Just this day, fifty years ago, Avoriaz’s local photographer shot François and I, as we were debuting on a ski tandem on the Arare area, a popular ski spot at that French ski resort.
If you want to know more about it, the story is available here. I have good reasons to believe that I was the first skier to invent the concept and implement it with my buddy. If you feel differently, just let me know. The key to success on that tandem, was constant and clear communication between the two partners!
We hardly practiced our tandem skiing and could have become proficient at it, had we spent just enough time to hone our skills, but we had to earn a living as ski instructors and in those days it was more like 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. Besides, it was the tail end of a long season (five consecutive ones for me) and we were pretty much exhausted.
The video, below, illustrate the saga of the variety of tandems that have been seen on snow. It begins with Francois and me, the founding fathers of the movement, with the original photos from April 13, 1972. The grace was already there, just some more training might have helped.
Later, in observing the pair of ski instructors from Courmayeur, Italy, filmed on March 29, 2012, we can see that they trained a smidgen more than us. Then on the flip side, we can observe two young Swedes, Jesper Tjäder and Øystein Bråten, doing a complete somersault in 2016.
We switch to cross-country skiing, just this season (February 2023), to follow two Minnesota skiers, Chris Parr and Joe Dubay, that completed the entire Birkebeiner ski cross-country race (55 km) in tandem as well. We follow by going back in time to March 21, 2022, in Châtel, France, to witness that tandem riding is also doeable on a snowboard and conclude in 2018, with an adorable French couple at La Mongie (Pyrenees Mountains) demonstrating that monoski is truly the best tool available for on snow tandem gliding…
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment