Old-fashioned skiing may still be the best way to whoosh down a snowy slope, but thrill seekers are rapidly inventing new-fashioned ways of descent. Just as snowmobiling has become the latest U.S. fad (TIME, Feb. 17), the sport of ski bobbing has caught on in Europe. Ski bobs range in price from $100 to $150, look like small bicycles on skis, weigh about 17 lbs., and can readily be dismantled to fit into car trunks. The tubular metal frame has handle bars connected to a short pivoting ski in front, and a well-padded saddle moored to a longer fixed ski in back. For added balance, ski bobbers wear mini-skis fitted with braking crampons on both feet.
Although the first ski bob was apparently patented in the U.S. in 1892, the sport only recently started flourishing in the resort center of Crans-Montana in the Swiss Alps. When the first handful of ski bobbers showed up there two years ago, they were greeted by derisive laughter; now the resort has three slopes set aside for their use, rents out 600 bobs at $4 per day. Half a dozen other Alpine resorts, including Davos, Arosa and St. Moritz, are readying skibob slopes for next season, in hopes of attracting an entirely new clientele: people on the far side of 40 who lack the nerve or muscle for skiing.
Record 102 M.P.H. Indeed, ease and safety are part of ski bobbing’s appeal. Nonskiers can master the sport in a day or two, learning to use their legs as shock absorbers while the bob dances freely beneath them. Since there are four points of contact with the snow, spills happen much less frequently than in skiing, and enthusiasts insist that it is virtually impossible to break a leg. Even when elated beginners go too fast and hit a bump, the worst that usually happens is a harmless wipe-out in soft snow.
Not that bobbing is necessarily for sissies. At last week’s Swiss International Grand Prix at Crans-Montana, Austria’s Willi Brenter, 24, outbobbed 113 competitors in the three-mile downhill run with a brisk average speed of 46 m.p.h. Brenter’s brother Erich holds the world’s speed record of 102 m.p.h., which is only 6 m.p.h. slower than Luigi de Marco’s speed record on skis. “It is a calumny to say that only older people are interested in ski bobs,” says Erich Brenter. “Ski bobs remove some of the danger of skiing—but none of the thrills.”
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