The Wood, the Wax, and the Schussing Video

Transcript:

[Rossland Museum & Discovery Centre logo on a white screen]

Ruth Grubisic: Old hickory skis you got from Eaton’s catalogue, which we were told later by ski instructors like Helmuth Mayrhofer and Hans Veit ‘they are too stiff for you!’ [laughs] ‘You need new skis!’ So we would go home and say, ‘Mum, we need new skis so can we have new skis for Christmas?’ That type of thing. Our old wooden skis with no steel edges were no good anymore because you just slid everywhere, so we had to have steel edges put on them and so then we’re going to get into Booty Griffiths, who brought skis in and if they didn’t have edges on them he put edges on them.

Butch Boutry: They were screwed in as you’re walking and then you’d lose half of them you know. Sometimes you’d have edges on one side then and, you know, the screws would pop off they would drag.

Ruth Grubisic: And if you were not very well off like our family was, you took your skis home and your mum and dad put the steel edges on them and if you broke a steel edge, they were down there repairing it at night so you could go there the next day if you lost an edge.

Butch Boutry: It was hard to keep them in good shape and then when they came out with the hidden edges then everything changed.

Patricia Stevens: When I first tried skiing, Bill showed me – he bought me some skis. They were 195, that’s the length [demonstrates with hands] and they were narrower. That’s what everybody was skiing on.

Ginger Baines: I used to have 190s [cm] for slalom, 200s for giant slalom and anywhere from 210s to 215s for downhill. Now everybody’s wearing short skis. Fat and short.

Butch Boutry: Waxing and that is really important because everybody is so close in the times. It’s hundredths of a second now so you have to make sure you get the right wax. You take two different waxes and mix them together to find the right wax then you test it and then you take it all off because it’s wrong [laughs]. In the racing world now, the courses are all so particular; smooth and not rough. In their earlier days, they shovelled some of it off but it was a little rougher. Everything’s a little smoother, technical, everything’s run, you know, to the ‘T’ to be perfect.

Nancy Greene Raine: During the years that I raced, there was a lot of changes. I saw the introduction of metal skis, the first metal racing skis were 1960. I won the downhill in Squaw Valley. Later on came fibreglass skis. Skiing is a very traditional sport and things change slowly but one of the biggest changes that came during my career was plastic ski boots.

Ginger Baines: When you went right away from leather to plastic that was a huge-I felt so stiff, I felt like I couldn’t bend my ankles. But you soon got used to them and you soon got to like them.

Nancy Greene Raine: I kept waiting for these boots and waiting for the boots but they started with the men’s 8s or 9s , 8s, 10s, 7s, 11s…By the time-I had such small foot I didn’t get my first Lange boots until March the following year and I have a picture of me in a race a world cup race in Franconia where I catch a tip in the race course I do a somersault and at the end you see my face and I’ve got a big grin on my face. It was the first time that I raced on Lange’s and I knew once I got used to them, I’d be untouchable. That’s how I won all the races at the end of that season and won the first World Cup. So the plastic ski boots really made a difference. The next big difference came along after I stopped racing was the shape skis. When I look back over technique, over all those years, we went through a period where we were all trying to hold our legs together. Man, I could never do it. Finally the technique got to be a little bit more of a solid platform with your feet apart, shifting the weight. Nothing’s really changed, but the equipment has made it easier to ski faster and you’re more precise.

[Text which reads, “Supported by” followed with a blue logo for the Trail and District Arts Council]