The British and the Modernisation of Skiing

E. John B. Allen looks at the British obsession that converted a mundane mode of transport into an internationally popular winter sport.

Kiandra "Snow Shoe" (Skiing) Carnival, New South Wales, Australia, in 1900.As a way of getting around, skiing may be six thousand years old, with artefacts dug from the bogs of Scandinavia and Russia to prove it. Pictographs, too, show evidence of early ski activity and the Nordic tales of Ullr and Skade, god and goddess of skiing, are well known, while the first written evidence for skiing comes from China in the second century bc.

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