5 Skiing backwards: Start with a snow plough, and work up to a stem christie. lean forward to prevent the ski tails going into the snow.

6 Backwards 360 on one ski: Move backwards on a traverse. Lift uphill ski. Come round backwards into the fall line on lower ski. Repeat on other traverse. Lean forward.

7 Backwards Royal Christie: If you have got this far, go for it on your own!

If you can only get to the second of these exercises, you will have felt the new experience of moving over the snow on the uphill ski. By completing all of them, you will have stretched ligaments (hopefully not too far), worked unused muscles, and most importantly built resistance for the future against unnecessary crashes. If you are interested in developing this branch of freestyle skiing further, get the details from the back of the book.

Watching ski racing on the television you would be forgiven for thinking that the downhillers are trying to cut their time by doing thirty or forty metre jumps, rather than rattling the whole way down on the ice. In fact a jump usually slows a racer down as it often takes a longer route than the course on the ground, and the landing tends to brake the skis. To ensure that he will be in the air for the shortest time, he needs to take certain precautions. It is often quite adequate to absorb the smaller bumps with avalment, but with rapid changes of gradient on a downhill course, combined with speeds up to 80 mph, this just isn't possible. Instead the racer will resort to a pre-jump.

Just before he gets to the point on the jump that would send him into orbit without remedial action, a racer does the equivalent of a standing jump. With good timing he should be coming down from his standing jump as he passes over the crest. With bad timing he'll be wishing he'd put the cat out. The timing is therefore crucial, and as if he didn't have enough to worry about, there is often the added problem of compression. Imagine that the hill goes into a little dip before rising up to the lip of a jump. Skiing into this at speed could make our intrepid downhiller feel twice his own weight for an instant, and almost at the same time he has to pre-jump. Downhill skiers are remarkably fit, and have good memories.

How does all this affect you? If you are going to do long fast turns on the piste safely, then you need to practise pre-jumping. The hillock you were skiing over before at 30 mph, is going to feel quite different at 50 or 60 mph. It is quite easy trying out a pre-jump over a small bump, perhaps not more than a foot high. Approach it on a traverse in a relaxed upright position. Go down slightly, and as you come up jump, bending the knees and bringing the skis up to you. You should just be off the ground as you go over the crown of the bump, and yet be starting to come down. Extend your legs to absorb the landing. In time it will be as easy as getting out of bed, and more fun as you progress on to larger bumps at faster speeds. In the air you should maintain the take off position with your knees up, and only lower them to absorb the landing. In an ideal world your arms would be down by your side, and ever so slightly forward. This will encourage you to keep the skis tips down and your body ever so slightly forward. As you do not live in an ideal world, remember that your arms and poles can be used like windmills to save you if necessary.

You can of course force a jump over the smallest bump. Approach the top of the bump in a slight tuck, and as you reach it, push down hard on both legs, standing up as you do so. As you take off, bring your knees up, and then lower them just before landing. Make sure there is no one on the blind landing side of bigger jumps. If you are going on a fun jumping day with some friends, make sure there is somebody signalling the all clear from the jump itself. There could be somebody on the landing side all of a jumble, and it is difficult to make course corrections when you are in mid air, and trying to avoid a possible manslaughter charge.

Choose a jump with a steep landing. If you fall you will hurt yourself less on a steep slope than on a flat one. The most dangerous jump is the one that lifts you vertically into the air, and then drops you on to a flat landing. The most satisfying straight jump is the one where you take off and follow the line of the hill for perhaps ten metres never more than half a metre off the snow. You will find that you can start on small bumps, and build up gradually.

A ski instructor was taking his class off piste and had skirted round a huge thirty foot cliff. All the class followed him dutifully, apart from one lone novice who had got left behind. The instructor stopped about fifty metres below the cliff and looked back in horror to see the straggler perched on the cliff edge in obvious confusion. ‘Don’t jump’, the instructor cried ‘Come round the side - it’s a precipice!’ The novice did not seem to hear him and edged even closer. ‘No!! Go round the side, it’s a precipice!! Oh dear’. The novice had jumped. From where the instructor and his class stood the crash looked appalling. The instructor sidestepped up to the poor fellow who was surrounded by pieces of broken kit, and sitting in the snow looking dazed. ‘Why did you do that?’ he said ‘Didn’t you hear me telling you it was a precipice?’ ‘Precipice?’ replied the skier ‘I thought you said ‘piece of piss’’. (For those unfamiliar with Anglo Saxon colloquialisms this phrase means 'very easy')

You’ve been looking at that cornice just off the top of the chair lift for a few days now haven’t you? It’s not very high is it, only about a metre on to a steep landing? So you ski over to it - Crumbs. It’s higher than you thought. The outrun looks a bit steep too. Trouble is, you've got to do it now. They’re all watching. Here goes ..... whoosh .... goodness me, you're still standing.

That’s all there is too it really. Start small. Take a good look at the landing. Make sure there are no rocks or other obstacles in the way, and push off, literally. I always aim slightly off to one side on a slight angle to catch a braking turn early so to speak. If you find you want to do more jumps like this one go for something ever so slightly bigger next time. Solid cornices are good jumps to work on because they usually vary in height along their length, and because more often than not the outrun is quite steep, which prevents landing accidents. Rocks and cliffs should be examined quite carefully from the edge, and if necessary from below as well to check for protruding rocks and trees on the way down. Whatever you do, don’t go off something you haven’t looked at first!

To avoid embarrassment do not try and jump into Corbett’s Couloir for a first try. Practise somewhere secretly if possible and then book your two weeks in Jackson Hole.

THE UPHILL SKI - Food for Thought

Bode Miller in Bormio 2010 shows how the uphill ski can be used with surgical precision towards the end of a GS turn. He is just about to rise and throw his upper body downhill for the left turn. There is no weight at all on the downhill ski!

 

We were all taught to put our weight on the downhill ski when we were learning, and even throughout this book most of the instructions emphasise the importance of weighting the downhill ski. But why do we weight the downhill ski? What’s wrong with weighting the uphill ski?

If you want to climb a ladder you put it against the wall at a certain angle to be safe. If the base is too far away from the wall then it will slide away. This will result in a nasty accident should you be twenty feet up with a glue pot pasting up the Wonderbra ad.

Apply the ladder analogy to your weight on skis (forget the Wonderbra ad for a moment - if you are able to).

For example, you are about to perform a text book christie stop on a steep hill upsides from your friends, who are ogling your dashing performance. With mounting panic you realise that there is not enough room to stop without taking them all out, so you adopt the famous flying-parallel-daisy-chopper. Almost parallel to the hill you try to execute this emergency braking procedure. You go way beyond the critical angle of lean, and you do a spectacular wipe out. Your friends are mightily impressed as long as you haven’t knocked them all for six.

This is the extreme, the critical moment when, with a combination of speed and the weight pushing it, the ski cannot recover.

There are slight differences between the ladder slipping and the ski slipping as the ladder is stationary before it starts moving and there are other considerations such as slope angles, surface conditions, and angulation, but the main similarity is where the centre of weight is in relation to each ski.

Imagine a skier standing still on an average slope. The further the centre of weight is away from the downhill ski (ie: uphill), the closer it will be to an uncontrollable slip sliding away. Now if we bring the centre of weight directly over the ski it should not in theory slide sideways at all (as long as the slope is not too steep). It will just hold its position through static friction. The more we move the centre of weight away uphill from a vertical position over the ski, the more chance there is of a side slip. You have probably seen this countless times when a skier comes to a bit of mountain unexpectedly steep, leans into the mountain, and the skis slide away from him.

Therefore we put the weight mostly over the downhill ski to maximise the lateral stability of the ski on the snow, but we don’t put all of it on the lower ski because we want to maximise the body’s lateral stability by letting our centre of weight swing between the two skis (as long as our legs are slightly apart). In short we do it to maintain balance - a little weight on the top ski but most of it on the lower ski.

So why don’t we put most of the weight on the top ski and a little on the lower ski? After all we’d still have the centre of weight between the two skis and there would still be a ski with most of the weight over it giving good static friction. Not only that, our weight would always be more over the uphill ski than the lower as the uphill leg on the inside of the turn would have less of a tendency than the lower outside leg to slide away.

It is true that our weight would be more over the ski but remember that if we put our weight on the uphill ski, then it is the uphill edge of the uphill ski that we are balancing on. This means that we have very little manoeuvre with our lateral balance if we want to keep most of our weight on the uphill ski.

Our balance would have to be near perfect as we run along on a knife edge We don’t have a spare leg upsides of our uphill ski to support us. Geddit? I have noticed snowboarders sometimes running their uphill arms along the snow for balance because they only have one edge after all, but it is impractical for us purists.

Having said all this there is a strong case for skiing as much as possible on the uphill ski but our balance must be good. There are several occasions in this book that I write about transferring weight to the uphill ski during a turn. The transfer takes place after the skier has crossed the fall line (otherwise it would not be the uphill ski!) in the form of a step up, and is known as lateral projection. Racers do it all the time as an integral part of certain turns or when they need to gain height. Experienced skiers will do it on long fast turns for fun to gain speed on a fast traverse as all the movement is forwards; there is virtually no chance of a braking side slip as there could be on the lower ski. Added to this (which I mention elsewhere), it makes for better control transferring from one edge to another on the same ski, rather than from one ski to the other.

There are also occasions when we suddenly find ourselves on the uphill ski when we didn’t intend to. Far from being a traumatic experience we should relish the moment and it will pass all too quickly. Be comfortable with spending the odd unexpected moment on the uphill ski and you find that it will sometimes get you out of a lot of trouble.

What you will find strange is the sudden precision of the steering on an uphill edge, and to begin with it may throw you off. There is a much more attractive margin for error with lateral weight shift and slide slipping or edging on the downhill ski than on the uphill ski where you will need to be far more precise with your weight placement.

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GLOSSARY

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CHAPTER 11