Major
races
Inception of the World Cup in 1967, brought a clear criterium for distinguishing the major ones,
from an array of other races. Yet, even before that year major races were easy to distinguish from
others simply by the strength of the competition, by the number of top ranked racers. Label I-A
was introduced in early 1960s to mark such races in the Calender, which were then credited
with 0,00 FIS points for the winner.
But even before the year 1958, when such FIS points were introduced, racers knew which races
were more important than the others. From the beginning, in the year 1928, Arlberg-Kandahar race
was recognized as the most important. Its success encouraged Arnold Lunn to ask for alpine races
to be included in the yearly FIS races (later, after the WWII recodnized as the World Championships).
So from the year 1931, onwards such FIS race were (along the A-K) considered as the most important
race of the year. Soon such status reached the International SDS races at Grindelwald, as well as
the Parsenn Derby at Davos, and a few other races. Thus, by mid 1930s there was a score of races
attended by almost all of the best racers.
After the war, it took a while untill such schedule re-emmerged, but by 1951 it was not only fully
re-established, but it turned out that such a dense programme was hard for even the best to endure.
Never the less, a string of major races was established from early January, till mid March, which is
rather easy to recognize. So easy, that is actually possible to reconstruct in retrospect the World Cup
for the entire period between 1931 and 1966, with exception of the war time.
Of course, although top international races are rather easy to distinguish from more local ones, there
is a grey zone, consisting of races where the contingent of international racers was not so strong, which
we may label as almost major races. Inter ski club diplomacy, some critical political moments, as well
as personal preference of some racers, provided for quite a number of such “almost major races”. They
were included into the List of Major races, but to distinguish them from the undisputably major ones,
these events were given only in bold letters, while for the major ones, italics were added too.
Therefore in this section, major races will be sorted out by the year, and by the resort, so that is possible
to search them on both accounts.
Besides the search on the year by year basis, in this section it is possible to look for the Major races with
long tradition by the resort. Yet, these traditional races could not always count on strong international
competition,
particularly in the
early years. Such races are marked only by italics.