Andrew Lycett
HEROES OF TELEMARK
Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing
By Roland Huntford (Continuum 456pp £25)

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Reading this book is like venturing onto the ski slopes on a freezing, wet day. At first light you look out of the window and decide it is not worth the effort. The weather is vile and you are likely to get bogged down in heavy snow. You persevere out of a sense of duty; the early runs are tough. But after a while you get the measure of the conditions. Then the sun breaks through and you begin to enjoy yourself.

So with Roland Huntford's book: I initially balked at the detail about the prehistoric origins of skiing and the technical aspects of bindings. I was wary that most of the first half focused on Norway, which, for all its virtues, is not a country to set the pulse racing. I suspected that Huntford's title was hyperbole: the words 'passion' and 'dramatic' serving to hide a marked lack of excitement.

But then I began to relax and appreciate the positive sides of Huntford's achievement. The breadth of his scholarship, which includes an easy familiarity with Scandinavian texts, is extraordinary. After a while his unreconstructed love of all things Norwegian becomes almost infectious. His 1979 study of the polar explorers Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen was controversial because it seemed to denigrate the Englishman's leadership skills. But, as this new book recalls, its argument was also based on an understanding of his Norwegian rival Amundsen's superior technical abilities. The latter won the race to the South Pole because he could draw on centuries of native experience, and so glide effortlessly across the Antarctic on skis, while Scott tramped leadenly through the snow in boots.

Significantly, this polar triumph came in 1911, six years after Norway's independence from Sweden, and was a cause for great national celebration. Huntford is good on this Scandinavian backdrop, which incorporates varying measures of national rivalry and cooperation.

Along the way he displays his erudition, from the etymology of 'ski' - derived from the old Norse word for 'split', as in a divided piece of wood, and coming from the same root as the Greek 'schizo' - to the Arab travellers in Russia who provided 'the first known description of a ski binding' in the twelfth century. (Huntford is fearsome in his search for the first instances of the most obscure skiing practices.)

His thesis is that, despite its diverse origins, skiing is a Norwegian sport. It was given modern form in Norway and for a long time was dominated by its nationals. The basic reason was that the country's topography - rolling hills and valleys, but nothing too steep - favoured movement on skis. Various methods of sliding over the snow evolved, using wooden skis rather than snowshoes. The champions were the people of Telemark, west of Oslo (or Christiania, as it used be known), who had the right temperament, terrain and technical know-how to pioneer a methodical form of cross-country skiing. They developed turns, such as the stem, and the slightly waisted ski shape that became the norm.

But for all this background and for all the romantic (particularly German) interest in the frozen North, the pastime only prospered when it escaped Norway's boundaries and took on elements of the more exciting downhill speed event now known as Alpine skiing.

In the 1860s, competitive skiing provided much-needed recreation for participants in the Californian gold rush. Money was wagered, and doping - or waxing - of skis became common. Although skiing helped promote the growth of feminism in Norway, where women hitched up their skirts and took to skiing in trousers, its rise was rather more dramatic in the United States. In one race in the Wild West, a man was shot dead after winning a women's race dressed in drag.

Before long the sport moved south to the Alps. Huntford nails the lie that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Norwegian-style skiing to Switzerland. (It had been around since at least the 1860s.) And he is a reliable guide to how Conan Doyle helped promote winter sports in the 1890s, when he was forced to spend long periods in Davos seeking a cure for his wife's tuberculosis.

For a while the Norwegians continued to dominate. But other countries were waiting to trip them up, including the duplicitous British. In Montana, Switzerland, Henry Lunn, a tour operator whose name is still found in firms such as Lunn Poly, set up one of the first modern downhill competitions, the (Earl) Roberts of Kandahar cup. At Mürren his son Arnold helped institutionalise this breakneck form of the sport by fine tuning the modern slalom and getting it accepted by the International Ski Federation and the Olympics. The Norwegians tried to boycott this bastard sport but were then forced to adopt it themselves.

Today the debate is more about skiing's harmful effects on the environment, as it requires forests to be cut down and demands energy-consuming lifts and snow machines. Huntford does not labour this point, adopting a more sophisticated approach in characteristic ruminations on topics such as the scientific structure of snow, which includes a thin layer of a water-like substance that aids lubrication and movement.

Looking back, I can still feel the buffeting from Roland Huntford's moguls. But I have a warm sense of having accomplished something worthwhile. This book will repay close reading. And it will provide answers to endless questions about skiing in pub quizzes.

Andrew Lycett is the author of 'Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes', recently issued in paperback by Phoenix. He didn't learn to ski until his mid-thirties, but is now an enthusiast and, in his dreams, cherishes the idea of being a ski instructor.