BY KAREN BOSSICK
Sun Valley kicks off its 88th winter season today on Bald Mountain. But the resort was just a teenager—14, to be specific—when the best skiers flocked to Sun Valley to ski the Harriman Cup.
The F.I.S. World Ski Championships were held in the United States for the first time in 1950, according to Sun Valley historian John Lundin. It kicked off with the Nordic World Championships in Lake Placid, N.Y., in January, and the Slalom and Downhill World Championships were held in Aspen the next month.
In March racers headed for Sun Valley for the Harriman Cup and the National Downhill and Slalom Championships.
“Never has the Harriman Cup field seen so many superb International skiers--11 nations represented in all...” wrote Gretchen Fraser, who won America’s first Olympic medals in alpine skiing with a gold and silver in 1948. “The courses were magnificent and they were raced by the brilliant field in a flawless manner. Both slalom and downhill were witnessed by more spectators than had ever before crowded in to watch a race at Sun Valley.”
The Harriman Cup was the first international ski race in North America when it started in 1937. It was originally held north of Ketchum on a mountain near SNRA headquarters. That mountain was eventually named Durrance Mountain for Dick Durrance, who won three of the first four Harriman Cups.
When Sun Valley decided to take it on a few years after its genesis, Otto Lang—then the director of the Sun Valley Ski School--took great pains to figure out a special downhill course for what he called “the world’s finest skiers.”
The Warm Springs course, was a severe test and a highly respected racing trail—fearfully fast, he said. But it didn’t offer any technical challenges as most racers “take it plumb straight,” he observed.
Olympic, which he called “a superior run in many ways,” had a flat spot after the Roundhouse slope, and that was frowned upon by the international racing community.
Lang finally settled on a course going down Exhibition as it would “provide the piece de resistance” for racers and offer excellent spectator opportunities.
One publication would go on to say that baseball had its world series, golf its National Open, horse racing its Kentucky Derby and skiing its 1.5-mnute Harriman Cup.
Sun Valley’s precipitous Exhibition, bristling like a hedgehog with jagged bumps, got its name because skiers coming down it could exhibit their skill and daring to riders on the chair going up, said Dick Dorworth, a Sun Valley skier who won Sun Valley's coveted Diamond Sun race in 1963 and also once held the world’s ski speed record.
“Exhibition’s unrelenting steepness over a distance makes it America’s most formidable mogul run today,” he said. “You may gasp at the idea of someone schussing straight down it, but world champion Emile Allais did so, and America’s daredevil Mad Dog (Dick) Buek (ski racer in “Other Side of the Mountain”) once did it 10 times in succession, cartwheeling in spectacular crashes more often than not.”
The downhill was 1.8 miles with a vertical drop of 3,000 feet. It started on top of Baldy, followed the upper section of the lift line, then went straight over the hump to the Roundhouse corner which required two exacting high-speed turns in the narrow passage, according to Lundin. Skiers then went under the chair at the Roundhouse onto a traverse leading to Exhibition and, finally, River Run.
The women’s course started above Rock Garden and went down Canyon, finishing on River Run.
The Harriman Cup was repeated for years, Lundin recounts, with one man finishing what was considered the toughest downhill in America in his underwear--his pants piled around his boot tops after he broke the belt on his pants coming off Exhibition.
Sun Valley Ski Patrol Director Nelson Bennett ordered gates placed on Rock Garden for the first time in 1953 after watching Christian Pravda, who would go on to win three Harriman Cups, practice a line through trees.
“We felt Pravda could have made it but we were concerned about some of the others,” he said.
The Harriman Cup was the only World Cup race held in the United States in 1975. It ceased after 1977 because of the disruption big ski races like that caused for skiing guests.
“The most difficult downhill in the world has not been run since,” said Dorworth, he concluded in Lundin’s book “Skiing in Sun Valley.”