Many years ago when everything was cheap by today’s standards, it still took X hours of hard work to earn X amount of money. In the early 1960s I could still buy a basic Volkswagen Bug for under $1,000 in Munich. I did just that five or six years later when I went over there to film. I would get a 90-day note at the bank, pay cash for the car, drive it for a month or so in Europe, then send it home and sell it for more than I paid for it six or seven weeks after I bought it.
Driving in Europe then was on narrow, winding, two-lane roads in the 1950s. I found my way across Austria, into Italy and finally to Yugoslavia to enter a Communist country for the first time. Marshall Tito ruled it. I was nervous because I did not speak their language and I was going to a ski-flying tournament.
Ski flying, as it became known, instead of ski jumping, was when a jumper started approaching the then mythical, 400-foot mark. The ski-flying technique began to change as the flyer started holding their hands at their sides instead of stretched out over their heads. The skis, parallel beneath them, still had not evolved to the tips wide apart for more lift and thus longer flights.
I snagged a hotel room with breakfast and a private bath in the best hotel in Planecia for $6 a night. The countryside was dirt poor under the Communist regime, but the ski-flying tournament brought welcome outside currency to the country for the once-a-year use of this massive hill.
In the pressroom at the hotel I was told that Marshall Tito would attend the tournament, and I was always eager to get unusual shots to share with my audiences all over North America. I found out the path that Tito would take to get to the judges’ stand. No ski lifts in those days.
I scoped out a dozen good spots to film the tournament and then found some trees I could hide behind and get up close and personal photos of Marshall Tito and his bodyguards as they walked by heading to the judges’ stand.
I was standing there munching on a Yugoslavian version of bratwurst and great fresh bread when I heard a lot of commotion and noise moving up the path towards my hiding place.
I had a mouth full of bratwurst when there was a sharp jab in my back. An automatic rifle got my immediate attention. “Hands above your head,” sounds the same in any language. After they examined each roll of film carefully and did a complete body pat down for hidden weapons I still had to move out into plain sight on the flat spot at the top of the landing hill.
I settled down to a fabulous day of scrambling hard and fast to get as much footage as possible of courageous men from all over world flying over 400 feet. There was an occasional dangerous wind gust but the tethered helium filled red balloons made the jumpers aware of clear air turbulence.
With new ski flying techniques, the hill record was broken a dozen times that day until it stood at 416 feet. That record stood for many years, until the wider apart ski tips began to be developed and the flyers were already holding their arms and hands at their sides, with their hands controlling their flight path like the ailerons of an airplane.
I was quite surprised this week to find out the world’s ski-flying record is now at 239 meters. That is a lot longer than two football fields and a few end zones. That is more than 700 feet. I think some of the freestylers of today should go to one of these ski-flying hills and see what a 700-foot flight feels like.