Weekend Telegraph article

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Weekend Telegraph article, December 2 1995

Lament to the years of unbent ankles

OVER the next few months, thousands will deposit themselves — and substantial sums of money — at ski schools around the Alps. Many will be getting a lousy deal. They won't necessarily realise it because learners are by definition inexperienced and so the Alpine air and scenery works its magic even upon the most dissatisfied customers.

But if one wants a testimony to the questionable quality of Alpine ski instruction, just listen to a real authority on the subject, Arno Perrench, director of the Zermatt Ski School. "We have good instructors and less good ones," he told The Sunday Telegraph last year. "We know who the less good ones are but we can't fire them because the ski school is a collective."

Well, thanks a million Arno. That's a wonderful game of chance you are offering. We hand over at least £120 to you for a week's tuition and we might get one of your prize duffers.

My own first experience was of this sort of teacher, as also it happens, in Switzerland, at Saas-Fee. The classes had as many as 15. Most of the time was spent standing around, waiting one's turn while watching the others. The ski school would argue that you should be learning all the time from other people's mistakes; I would argue that the best way to learn is to ski. Anyway, they had the appalling lift queues for which the resort was then well known — a new lift system has since improved things — sometimes reduced the amount of skiing time to less 15 minutes during a two-hour session.

To be fair, the lessons seemed technically adequate, but the commitment of the instructors was minimal. One had the sensation of stuffing expensive Swiss francs into a slot machine to play a taped message. One could not deny that they spoke English but it was frankly inadequate for the tricky task they faced. They used strange 'Euro-words' like "flexion" and "compression" — concepts which meant as little to me as "subsidiarity".

Some were appallingly arrogant too, and we patient learners had to put up with their tiresome jokes, their graspingness — and even their flirtatiousness. "Oh for God's sake," an exasperated French woman snap as she snatched her hands away from the spaniel-like droolings of one wretched Romeo.

IN SPITE of all this, my enthusiasm remained. I ploughed on for a few seasons, but it was the experience at Morzine/Les Gets in France in Les Portes du Soleil that changed everything.

There, I signed up with the British Alpine Ski School. By the end of the week my skiing was transformed. The director, Hugh Monsey, spoke English as his first language, he had an abiding commitment to teaching, and he had been through the French ski school system, and he'd rely on what he had learned there. He had thought a great deal about the subject himself.

He kept his classes small (never more than eight) and his method was brilliant. I will always remember him for a simple piece of instruction, one which directly contradicts the lumbering official ski schools: bend the ankles, Hugh commands, not the knees. The difference is extraordinary, the effect is immediate. People's progress assumes an astonishing new grace.

If you doubt me, just try it for yourself now. Simply stand with your feet parallel in an imaginary pair of skis, letting your knees move slightly forward as they do when you are wearing boots. Now, bend your knees and ankles. You will notice, if you have done so obediently, that the first movement sent you backwards and gave you confidence, while the second brought you over your skis and made you feel like Alberto Tomba.

Hugh Monney taught the many valuable things and to this day, whenever the drill looms, it is his instructions that I repeat to myself. It was he that got me down the mountain. After that experience, I resolved I would always seek out, if possible, a native English speaker as a teacher. Not only because they could convey the subtleties of skiing much more easily than anyone else, but also because they were less likely to be tainted by the classic skiing teaching systems of the Alps.

Many of the large schools do have foreign teachers and in one resort a young Canadian proved enormously helpful. However, told that he was treated with great disdain and unfairness by the chief of the school, always being the last to be allocated pupils because the locals were given preference. This favouritism may be understandable but it isn't in the interests of those of us who want to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible.

In my quest for good teachers, I've learned that learners are very different creatures. Some of us learn through the eyes, others through the ears; some need to understand the physics of it, others just need to feel. There are people who can respond to every kind of learning and every style.

For formal elegance, the Arlberg school, in St Anton, is famous, but I found its splinter school, called the St Anton, punishingly competent. The Arlberg occupied smart and spacious offices. The instructor I had was a local veteran who spoke English and, like one who has been doing a job for too long, he seemed to be functioning on automatic pilot.

The St Anton School, on the other hand, operating from prefabricated premises resembling the office of a struggling insurance company, provided an enthusiastic young Finnish instructor who spoke good English and was a very skilful and encouraging teacher.

For nervous and languid, I recommend the US. And there you can trust the big ski schools. At Steamboat Springs, in Colorado, the language barrier and the expansion of the instructors gave me the sense that I was embarking on a course of analysis. They analysed me enormously. My English was a help, I guess; it was as if they had been trained never to criticise, never to say a negative word. But they were good.

In Courchevel I tried an afternoon of inner skiing in heavy sludgy snow and near-zero visibility at the hands of a softly spoken Brit. As if the conditions weren't bad enough, he made me ski with my eyes shut. I fell over a lot but sort of understood what he was getting at.

His approach was the antithesis of the Saas-Fee school. He wasn't teaching how to ski the terrain but rather how to feel it.

Another outfit to teach along these lines is Mountain Masters at Val d'Isère. Its lessons were conducted at terrific speed. I was pushed to such a limit for so long that eventually I couldn't be bothered to worry. Never mind the Arlberg school of elegance, their aim was to teach exaggerated movement to achieve a looseness; it was more about 'feel' than technical precision. Very French really. And very good.

I still persist with lessons. The chances of skiing are so rare, I need all the help I can get. But before I choose an instructor, I try to get as much information as possible. I hunt for the committed, the enthusiastic, the talented and the natural English speakers, and I avoid the official ski schools like the plague.

M.L.

British Alpine Ski School operates at Morzine/Les Gets in the French Portes du Soleil; book on UK on 01485 572596. Mountain Masters at Val d'Isère can be contacted on 00 33 79 06 05 14; the St Anton Ski School on 00 43 54 46 56 35.