ASPEN — With Mikaela Shiffrin on the brink of making major ski racing history this week at the World Cup Finals in Aspen, the EagleVail phenom will be performing on slopes that have held a special place in the sport since the 1950 world championships gave the fledgling resort international exposure only three years after the first chairlift opened. But the history of the former silver mining town and ski racing have been intertwined even longer, going back to the first race on Aspen Mountain in 1937.
Shiffrin is likely to become the youngest World Cup overall winner since 2003 and the fifth American to claim skiing’s most prestigious prize, but she will be in great company with the many gold medalists who have raced on the mountain riddled with 19th-century mine shafts. Austria’s Franz Klammer won a World Cup downhill here only five weeks after claiming the Olympic gold medal at the 1976 Olympics with the most famously daring downhill run in the history of the sport. Bill Johnson, the first American to win Olympic downhill gold at the 1984 Olympics, won at Aspen 16 days after he made history in Sarajevo. A one-season wonder, he won only two other races in his career.
This week, Vail’s Lindsey Vonn, who has 77 World Cup victories, will be looking for more to bring her closer to the record-setter she is chasing, Sweden’s Ingemar Stenmark. He claimed his 86th and last World Cup win in Aspen, a giant slalom in 1989.
But there have been infamous stories as well. In March 1986, 30 of the top racers refused to participate in a men’s World Cup giant slalom and made sure no one else did, blockading the course. The racers, many of whom were concerned about their place in the World Cup standings with only two weeks left in the season, claimed soft snow and poor visibility created unfair conditions. The late Serge Lang, a co-founder of the circuit and a towering figure in the sport, was nearly apoplectic about the boycott.
“What happened today was bad, very, very bad,” Lang said. “It was bad for the image of the World Cup, bad for the sponsors. They are not amateur racers, they are professional racers. They should act as professionals.”
Longtime Aspenite Bob Beattie, also a co-founder of the World Cup and the creator of the U.S. Ski Team, was livid as well.
“This is a black eye on World Cup skiing,” Beattie said. “They should never have prevented other skiers from skiing. Skiing’s an individual sport. They should never block gates.”
The record book says five Americans have won seven of the 74 World Cup races in Aspen since 1968. Phil Mahre won giant slaloms in 1981 and 1983. Shiffrin won back-to-back slaloms in 2015. But American AJ Kitt was the apparent winner twice in downhills, only to have them nullified.
Kitt was in the lead of a downhill in 1993 after 20 racers when the race jury, lead by Karl Frehsner of Austria, decided to cancel the race because of a rut the jury claimed was unsafe. The Americans vehemently disagreed, suspecting ulterior motives by the European officials of the sport.
“Politics is getting the best of our sport,” Kitt said.
Andy Mill, then the director of skiing for the Aspen Skiing Company, didn’t buy the European explanation that the race was canceled because of safety concerns. Mill, who grew up in Aspen, finished sixth in the Olympic downhill Klammer won in 1976. It was the best American Olympic downhill result until Johnson won in 1984.
“The question I have for the FIS is: If this problem would have occurred at Kitzbuehel, at the Lauberhorn — the big, traditional downhills in Europe — with (Switzerland’s) Franz Heinzer in the lead, would they have canceled that race?” Mill said that day in 1993. “I’m very concerned with injury. I’ve had nine knee operations, two broken legs, a broken neck and a broken back. I understand injury, I understand risk. But I feel American ski racing was robbed today.”
Then it happened again. In a downhill two years later, the jury stopped the race because of deteriorating course conditions after 31 of the 68 racers — including the top racers — were finished with Kitt in the lead. The jury declared him the winner, but the FIS Council overturned the decision three days later.
Kitt is here as a spectator, and he holds no grudges.
“It’s all good memories,” Kitt said Monday during official downhill training. “It’s really good to be back here, and I’m really glad to see men’s speed racing here again. This is a historical place.”
About the World Cup
The World Cup tour began in 1967 and the first World Cup races in Aspen were held in 1968, but the history of ski racing on Aspen Mountain goes back 80 years. The first race was held in 1937 on a course laid out by Swiss mountaineer Andre Roch. World War II intervened, but in 1946 the first Roch Cup races were held. The Roch Cup was one of the most prestigious races in the U.S., and its winners included Barney MacLean (1946), Pete Seibert (1947), Olympic champion Stein Eriksen of Norway (1953), Buddy Werner (1959, 1961), Bill Marolt (1962) and Billy Kidd (1964-65).
