 Several Scandinavian nations had ski regiments even then; the earliest recorded use of ski troops was during Norway’s civil war, somewhere around 1200. The biathlon—cross-country skiing combined with rifle shooting—has roots in civilian hunting, but it was the Norwegian military that turned it into a competition.
Other events are really just modernized and winterized ancient games. Curling comes from Scotland, but the concept of throwing (or pushing) one object at another object is about as old as games get. Ice hockey has precursors all over the world, but using a stick to hit an object (ball, puck, whatever) is pretty fundamental.
Then there’s luge. Luge is pure folly, a creation of bored, aristocratic, and sometimes destructive men on vacation. Do you remember ever being bored on vacation, and making up a game with a sibling—tossing seashells or creating an obstacle course in the hotel room? Now imagine that game ended up a heavily funded fixture at the freaking Olympics. That’s luge.
Luge first emerged in the late 1800s, in the Swiss Alps, and more specifically in two resort towns: Davos and St. Moritz. At the time, these towns were used as summer resorts by aristocrats from all over Europe for their clean, temperate, alpine air. The names and dates get a little fuzzy or disputed here, but some time, probably in the 1860s, somebody—maybe some German doctors, maybe a Swiss hotelier—decided that only operating these resort towns during the summer was leaving money on the table. Winter in the Swiss Alps is great, they thought, so how can we get people here?
Winter sports had been growing in popularity, around the same time that others—soccer, boxing—were codifying and formalizing their rules. It was the age of steam, making travel more accessible to some and leading to more formalized global structures. Kingdoms, empires, or fiefdoms were giving way to connected nations bound by a common identity of some sort. The Industrial Revolution also made many non-royals—industrialists—extremely rich for the first time. And where there are rich industrialists, there are rich and bored children of industrialists.
In the 1860s and 1870s, some of these rich, bored folks began to head to the Swiss Alps for winter vacation. Two excellent books on luge, which delve into the history of the sport, were written in 1894. Both were penned by Englishmen, and carry a bit of English superiority, but by their accounts, Davos had become a recreational ski resort by the 1880s. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was an early Davos skier, and publicized the sport in some of his articles.) “The nature of the Englishman is competition,” writes Harry Gibson in Tobogganing on Crooked Runs. “Whether riding, driving, walking, running, or sliding down a hill he must race, otherwise the amusement palls on him.”
Sledding was done at Davos as well, but early sleds were not particularly well-suited for competitive sport because, well, you couldn’t steer them. Some of the earliest accounts of sledding are the (possibly apocryphal) use of shields as sleds by the Cimbric, probably a northern Germanic tribe, who slid down the sides of mountains to attack (and lose to) the Romans in 103 B.C. This idea of a sled as an unsteerable plank was pretty universal until the late 1800s.
Interestingly, the word used for sledding, even competitive sledding, by those in the Alps who were documenting the birth of the sport was not sledding or luging (the French term). It was “tobogganing.” That word comes from, probably, one of a couple of Algonquin languages spoken by the residents of eastern Canada and northern New England. To these late-1800s writers, the toboggan was the overall category of equipment, and there could be many types of toboggans.
This early period of winter sports creation in the Alps drew Englishmen and Americans. In broad strokes, the Americans brought the equipment, and the Englishmen brought the ceremony. It was these tourists who, when they weren’t skiing, took sleds down the picturesque mountains, often right down the main roads in to