The 2026 Winter Olympics start next week and for the next few weeks I’ll be sharing information about past Olympics. This year the women’s Alpine skiing events will being held at Cortina d’Ampezzo. That same locale hosted the entire 1956 Winter Olympics some 70 years ago. Of course this year’s Olympics includes 116 events while the 1956 games had only 24 events! One of the new events at this year’s Olympics is Skimo (ski mountaineering.) It will be interesting to see the TV coverage of this new event.

But let’s go back to the 1956 Olympics. It was the second Olympics that featured three Alpine events, Downhill, Giant Slalom, and Slalom for men and women.  And it was the first time where an individual won all three events! That was Toni Sailer of Austria and I’ll have more to say about him in a moment. Austria dominated the Alpine skiing medals winning a total of 9 of the 18 medals awarded. Switzerland won 4 and 5 countries won one medal each. The U.S. did not win any medals.

Toni Sailer was born in Kitzbuhel Austria. He burst onto the competitive skiing scene in 1952 when he won his first downhill at age 16. He was only 20 when he won his three Golds at Cortina! And none of the races were particularly close. Today we’re used to races being decided by hundredths of a second and a one second margin is considered huge. Sailer won the Downhill by 3.5 seconds, the Slalom by 4.2 seconds, and the GS by a staggering 6.2 seconds! Of course skiing and ski racing were a lot different then so margins were larger, but the difference between second and third for the three events were .5, 1,5, and .9 seconds. Sailer’s domination earned him the nickname “The Blitz from Kitz!”

At the 1958 World Championships he almost repeated his sweep by winning the Downhill and GS, but finishing second in the Slalom. He still came away with three Golds since the World Championships also had a Combined (Downhill and Slalom) medal which Sailer won.

In 1957 Toni Sailer made an appearance in Stowe where he won the American International Cup Downhill on the Nosedive! There is a great old newsreel from that race that’s available on YouTube. It shows the old single chair, the Octagon, the upper Nosedive, and there’s lots of action shown in the “Seven Turns.”  For those not familiar with that term, where today’s Nosedive has three turns, the old Nosedive was narrower and had seven turns. If my memory is correct, it was 1966 when the Nosedive was modified to host another international race. The film is a “must watch” and only a couple of minutes long. I plan to include a link to the film on my blog post. I’ll also include links to a couple of videos of Sailer’s 1956 Olympic runs.

Sailer retired in 1959 at the age of 23. He pursued a career in entertainment as an actor and singer.  Most of his films and albums were in German which limited his market. But you can still find examples on YouTube. He also lent his name to one of the first all-fiberglass skis which was made in Canada. He died in 2009 at age 73.