National Sport of Austria: Skiing

As well as being attributable to the ideal landscape and climate, the pleasure Austrians take in skiing also has a historical aspect. Matthias Zdarsky (1856-1940) wrote the first ski instruction manual in 1897, invented the first practical ski binding and, in 1905, organized the first slalom competition in skiing history on the slopes of the Muckenkogel, near Lilienfeld in Lower Austria.

Since then, Austria has been recognized as the leading country for Alpine skiing, both in terms of theory and of methods. The “Arlberg technique”, named after the first ski school in the Tyrolean village of St. Anton am Arlberg, is well known to all skiers. This tradition has been maintained for many years in the Federal Skiing College at St. Christoph am Arlberg, which is the center of the renowned state training scheme for ski instructors in Austria. This training scheme also constantly generates new stimuli for innovative skiing techniques.

Making the mountains accessible via cable cars and ski lifts, which is an important aspect in skiing, has been actively pursued since the end of the Second World War. Whereas in 1945 only 12 cable railways, 8 mountain railways and 6 ski lifts existed, by 1998 there were some 3,300 lift facilities in all. Thanks to the installation of numerous means of ascent, eight glacier regions in Austria have also been made available for summer skiing.

Toni Sailer, Karl Schranz, Annemarie Moser-Pröll, Franz Klammer, Petra Kronberger, Hermann Maier, Renate Götschl and Stephan Eberharter, are all internationally-known names in the world of skiing. They and other Austrian skiers have won numerous Olympic medals, world championships and World Cup titles.

Other winter sports practiced in Austria are ski-bobbing, ski-jumping, the Nordic combination (ski-jumping and cross-country skiing), cross-country skiing, snowboarding, bob racing and tobogganing.