Pure & Parallel

U. S. ski enthusiasts, eagerly sniffing the chill autumn air for snow last week, suddenly found a healthy January blizzard raging in their samovar. For Emile Allais, who last February at Chamonix won the International Ski Federation's World Championship by taking firsts in the slalom and downhill races, laid down a new and highly controversial rule for skiing. All skiing turns should be abandoned, said Champion Allais, excepting the pure Christiania and the parallel Christiania. The French Ski Federation heartily concurred with its champion and, when his Le Ski Franc,ais was published last week at Bellegarde, a small town in France, the Federation promptly adopted it as the official method of teaching Frenchmen to ski.

This is nothing short of revolution in ski technique, for the first things U. S. ski masters teach neophytes are the stem turn and the stem-Christiania, executed by braking with one ski, then edging the other over. Pure "Christies" (now learned after stemming is mastered) involve no stemming, but are accomplished by swinging the weight of the body while thrusting one ski forward. They are more graceful and faster than stem turns, or the other great ski maneuver--the Telemark.*

Ski masters in the U. S. shook their heads over this hasty French abandonment of a 20-year-old tried-and-true technique, doubting whether better skiers could be produced by limiting their repertoire of ski-maneuvers.

*Originally the orthodox ski technique, Telemark turns (accomplished by sliding one ski far forward so that it guides the other into the turn) are practical only in deep snow, lost favor when the Christiania technique was developed.

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