A New Way of Skiing

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

It would overstating it to say that Ted Ligety won the men’s giant slalom lying down — but not by much. It’s a point that we, and no doubt many others, were able to savor via the fabulous dispatch in the New York Times the other day in respect of his style. The piece was by Michael Bostock, Alexandra Gardica, Joseph Ward, and George Knowles and focused on the fact that, as they put it, “no skier in the world carves turns the way Ted Ligety does.” They reported that the American “has practically invented a new way of skiing.”

We don’t mind saying that we found it inspiring. We’ve been skiing more than twice as long as Mr. Ligety has been alive. We’ve seen our share of the immortals. Tony Sailer, who won all three Alpine Golds and, because he was from Kitzbühel, became known as the “Blitz from Kitz.” We also saw Jean Claude Killy, though not when he also won all three alpine gold medals. We saw Billy Kidd and Buddy Werner (and actually skied for a day with his celebrated sister, Skeeter). We got the autograph of Chiharu “Chick” Igaya (he inked it vertically in Japanese) after he ran the Nose Dive at Stowe.

Of course, that was all back in the era of leather ski boots and bindings. When we awoke from a long hibernation into the world of modern skiing, we could hardly believe our eyes. It had become so scientific and the margins so close that we began to imagine that the opportunity for art was disappearing. This is what is so wonderful about the Times dispatch. It’s a reminder that the test is not only in the speed and all that. It’s also in the ability to think through the physics and in the guts to try a new technique.

This is what the Times captured in respect of Mr. Ligety. It traced his descent in camera angles illuminating how he begins his turns earlier and bursts from them with greater spring than competing skiers. He fights the mountain less. He is therefore more graceful. It ran a side-by-side video comparison of Mr. Ligety and another alpine giant, Bode Miller, showing that in a turn Mr. Miller creates a greater spray of snow and thus loses speed. Most of all, it marked how almost completely horizontal Mr. Ligety gets when he is in his turns. Only the edges of his skis are in the snow.

In other words, he maintains what the Times quotes him as calling “big edge angle.” It would be like, say, Rembrandt inventing a new way to hold a brush or Casals a bow. Mr. Ligety’s slalom, when one sees it laid out by the Times, appears to be more serpentine, more elastic. The word it uses to describe him coming out of a turn is slingshot. We wouldn’t want to suggest the other Olympians lack for style, but the record is that Mr. Ligety left the silver medalist in the dust — by the vast, intractable expanse of nearly half a second.


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use