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70 free Ski trivia questions with answers. Skiing has a longer memory than most sports. These 70 questions start with the Old Norse word for a cleft plank and the Telemark farmer who bent skis into shape, then move through Arnold Lunn's first slalom, the banana-conveyor engineer who built the first chairlift at Sun Valley, and the racers who defined the World Cup: Stenmark, Killy, Klammer, Tomba, Maier, Vonn, Hirscher and Shiffrin. The rest ranges wherever a ski bum's conversation does. Freestyle, ski jumping and Nordic combined get their share, as do the resorts everyone argues about (Chamonix, St. Anton, Vail, Whistler, Aspen, Zermatt, Niseko), the equipment that changed everything from Head's laminated ski to Elan's carving sidecut, the piste colours, ski films from Downhill Racer to Hot Dog, après-ski, avalanche safety and speed skiing's 255 km/h record. It suits anyone who has ridden a chairlift, from World Cup obsessives to once-a-year holiday skiers. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia and other primary sources before publication, so the dates, margins and nicknames are the real ones.
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Q 01The word 'ski' comes from the Old Norse skíð, which meant what?
Cleft wood
Old Norse skiers said fara á skíðum, 'to travel on skis'. Finnish never borrowed the word at all, using its own suksi instead.
Q 02Norse mythology's Ullr and Skaði are regarded as the god and goddess of skiing and what other pursuit?
Hunting
Procopius described the Sami around 550 CE as skrithiphinoi, roughly 'ski-running Finns'.
Q 03Sondre Norheim, the 'father of Telemark skiing', later emigrated and is buried in which US state?
North Dakota
He settled near Villard in McHenry County, where the flat prairie offered almost no downhill skiing; locals said he kept a pair of skis outside his door anyway.
Q 04In 1868 Norheim won the first national skiing competition held in which city?
Christiania
Christiania was the old name of Oslo, and the 'christie' turn takes its name from the city.
Q 05Telemark skiing is named after a region in which country?
Norway
The style was reborn in the United States in 1971 after a group of skiers read Stein Eriksen's book Come Ski With Me.
Q 06Who invented the slalom race, first run in 1922 with the winner decided purely on time?
Arnold Lunn
He wrote that 'a fast ugly turn is better than a slow pretty turn', breaking with earlier pole races that were judged on style.
Q 07On the practice slopes of which Swiss resort was that first 1922 slalom set?
Mürren
The same village became home to the Kandahar Ski Club, founded in 1924 and named for Lord Roberts of Kandahar.
Q 08Downhill and slalom made their Olympic debut at which Winter Games?
1936 Garmisch-Partenkirchen
Lunn refereed the slalom there while his son Peter captained the British team, but neither marched in the opening procession in protest at the Nazi hosts.
Q 09The world's first chairlifts were installed in 1936 at which resort?
Sun Valley, Idaho
They went up on Proctor and Dollar mountains; one of those early single chairs now runs at Mount Eyak in Cordova, Alaska, the oldest operating chairlift in the world.
Q 10James Curran based his 1936 chairlift design on equipment built to load what onto ships?
Bananas
He had worked for an Omaha steel firm that engineered banana conveyors for tropical cargo ships and simply swapped the hooks for chairs.
Q 11Which railroad opened the first US destination winter resort, its Idaho lodge, in December 1936?
Union Pacific
Chairman W. Averell Harriman sent an Austrian count across the West to find the site; a Boise employee tipped him that the Ketchum spur cost more in snow removal than any other line.
Q 12Hannes Schneider, often called the father of modern skiing, pioneered which technique of ski instruction?
Arlberg
He is said to have made his first skis by copying a visitor's pair with help from a local barrel maker in Stuben.
Q 13Which country hosted the first Winter Olympics in 1924?
France
The Games were held at Chamonix, and the International Ski Federation (FIS) was formed the same year.
Q 21Which downhiller won four consecutive World Cup downhill seasons from 1975 to 1978?
Franz Klammer
He won 25 World Cup downhills including a record four on the full Streif course at Kitzbühel, and skied to school each winter as a farm boy in Carinthia.
Q 22What did Alberto Tomba's father promise him if he won Olympic gold in 1988?
A Ferrari
After winning at Calgary he told his father on live television that he wanted it in red. He picked up two golds there, in slalom and giant slalom.
Q 23Tomba was popularly known by which nickname?
La Bomba
At 182 cm and 90 kg he muscled through the spring-loaded gates introduced in the early 1980s, taking far more direct lines than lighter rivals.
Q 14Which alpine racing discipline was first run in December 1982, decades after the others?
Super-G
Its small crystal globe was not awarded until 1985-86; for three seasons its points were folded into the giant slalom standings.
Q 15Where was the inaugural Alpine World Cup race held on 5 January 1967?
Berchtesgaden, West Germany
French journalist Serge Lang dreamed up the circuit with the French and US team directors, and Jean-Claude Killy and Nancy Greene took the first two overall titles.
Q 16How much does the big crystal globe awarded to the World Cup overall champion weigh?
9 kilograms
The discipline winners get a smaller 3.5 kg globe. Race points run 100 for a win down to a single point for 30th place.
Q 17Stenmark's 86 World Cup wins came in only two disciplines, neither a speed event. Which pair?
Slalom and giant slalom
He avoided the speed events, saying he was not comfortable above about 120 km/h, and his 86 wins stood as the record until 2023.
Q 18Stenmark still holds the record World Cup winning margin. How far ahead was he at Jasna in 1979?
4.06 seconds
Bojan Križaj of Yugoslavia was the distant runner-up. Stenmark was later banned from the 1984 Olympics for taking sponsorship money directly.
Q 19Jean-Claude Killy swept all three alpine golds at the 1968 Olympics in which host city?
Grenoble
Those Games were the first extensively televised in color in the US, and Killy signed with Mark McCormack's IMG that May.
Q 20Toni Sailer, first man to sweep the alpine golds at one Olympics, was the 'Blitz from' where?
Kitz
He won the 1956 downhill, slalom and giant slalom by 3.5, 4.2 and 6.2 seconds respectively, margins unthinkable today.
Q 24Hermann Maier's nickname, the 'Herminator', links him to which action star?
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Days before winning two golds at Nagano he had cartwheeled off the downhill course through two layers of safety netting and walked away.
Q 25Maier nearly lost his lower right leg in August 2001 in what kind of accident?
Motorcycle crash
He missed the whole 2002 season including the Salt Lake City Olympics, then returned in January 2003 and won a super-G at Kitzbühel two weeks later.
Q 26Bode Miller grew up in a log cabin without electricity near which New Hampshire ski area?
Cannon Mountain
He was homeschooled until third grade and later won six Olympic medals, the most of any US skier.
Q 27Lindsey Vonn's 2010 Olympic downhill gold was a first for whom?
An American woman
She was born Lindsey Kildow in Saint Paul and learned at Buck Hill, a small Minnesota bump that also produced Kristina Koznick.
Q 28Which gold medalist did a nine-year-old Lindsey Kildow meet, and later count as her mentor?
Picabo Street
Street said of watching her ski in 1999: 'The faster she went, the bigger the smile she got on her face.'
Q 29After a comeback in November 2024, Vonn became the oldest downhill World Cup winner at what age?
41
She had retired in 2019 citing injuries and had already collected a record 20 crystal globes by 2016.
Q 30The first alpine skier to reach 100 World Cup wins did it in February 2025 in a slalom at which Italian resort?
Sestriere
Mikaela Shiffrin's century is unmatched by any alpine skier, man or woman. She was born in Vail and became the youngest Olympic slalom champion at 18 in 2014.