You know that scene in the ski movie Hot Dog where the fierce rivalry between Harkin and Rudicomes to a head in an intense ski ballet competition, each free skier vigorously competing for gold with flawless pirouettes, arabesques and jetés on snow? Of course you do. Well, it turns out that despite all the cinematic hyperbole that goes into the extravagant sequence, it wasn’t exactly fiction.
If, like me, you came to skiing in the past 25 years, you probably associate the sport with increasingly fat and light skis, hunting down deep powder stashes and hucking cliffs. Sure, skiing in the 1970s really was the non-stop parade of silver Lurex jumpsuits, aviator shades and cutesy ski motif-festooned acrylic turtlenecks we see in Hot Dog, but the similarities between reality and the cult classic ski flick end there.
