Speed Skiing World Records from 1874 to 1999

Speed skiing went through a number of organizational convolutions after 1984, stabilizing in 1993 when the French Ski Federation became the sanctioning body for the races. Eighty to a hundred racers follow the annual World Speed Skiing Championship Tour of three to five races, similar to alpine skiing’s World Cup. Speed skiers are professionals even though they went amateur when the FIS was the organizing body for the 1992 Olympic Speed Skiing Demonstrations, and returned to professional status after the Olympics. Perhaps the biggest change in the sport is the grooming of the speed track. Since the early 1990s grooming machines have been winched down the speed track, making the track safer and faster. Franz Weber says winch-grooming definitely increased average speed—the record has risen 10 mph in the 1990s.

Notes:
1. Tommy Todd’s record is unofficial, even assuming stop watches good to a tenth of a second were used to time him. But his record certainly was accepted by the California speed skiing crowd.

2. Ralph Miller’s 108.7 mph was timed by Emile Allais with a stop watch good to a tenth of a second. One tenth of a second’s difference over 50 meters, the length of the speed trap, equals close to 18 mph; the possibility is inescapable that Miller was not the first to go over 100 mph on skis. In this case, Luigi Dimarco has the honor. But Miller’s run inspired Dick Dorworth and C.B. Vaughan to break the record at Portillo using electic-eye timing, and that in turn attracted future record-holder Steve McKinney to the sport.

3. Unofficial, to say the least. Ms. Joy’s time but not the length of her run was reported in The Mountain Messenger. The figure given assumes she ran the men’s 1,230-foot speed track.