RIDERS OF THE AIR.

Hokitika Guardian, 18 April 1923, Page 2

RIDERS OF THE AIR.

SWITZERLAND, Jan. *2O The event is the ski-jumping championship of the Bernese Obcrland, and far us the slope, among the lower lies, the mannikin figures of the competitors stand waiting. Forty yards below them, at the head of a double rank of ski-mounted onlookers, is an artificial snow-plat form built out across the track and fated scarlet with the Swiss flag. From this shell' the jumpers will take their spring with till the impetus of a headlong rush down the mountain side behind them, and when next they touch the almost precipitous descent they will have shot thirty or forty yards through the air, with nothing but the d i-'.y.y void of the deep valley beneath their feet. The ski-jumper, in fact, hits to conquer completely the very natural human flinching from hurling oneself unsupported into space. 11 is nerve must he as cool as the snows of a Swiss winter.

It is impressive enough from the valley below to watch him make his flying fall through the air, keeping an upright balance by a whirling movement of the arms, but if you plod pantingly tip through the snow by the zigzag path that eventually reaches the take-off platform and lake a look at the game from the standpoint of the jumper, you get a shiver in the spinal cord, a sudden clamminess in the palms of the hands, and that same queasy sensation that comes of watching a steeplejack ;ii work. From his starting-point away up towards the crest what the competitor sees of his course is the knife-edge of that jumping-platform—and then, five hundred feet below, the snow-covered roofs of the houses in the valley, and a little far-away crowd of dark figures on the flat gathered to watch him run out tit the mountain foot. At the word “Go” he flashes off downhill at the speed of a runaway bicycle, bending low into a squatting position on bis ski as lie nears the jump. It is at the moment of leaving flic edge that his nerve must stand by him, for the least recoil from flic plunge will give him a dangerous fall.

Instead, lie must lean forward, craning boldly into the void beneath his ski, and so remain, upright with outstretched arms, falling, falling, lulling, until, a hundred feet farther down the slope, he hits- the white face of the mountain again with a thud that echoes across the valley. But the shock hardly even jars him, for the gradient is so steep that the impetus of his landing is expended in shooting him on down to the valley at mill-race speed. .Still he must keep leaning forward till his body is at right angles with the slope, balancing himself with bent knees over uneven places, the least of which may throw him off his balance, until at last he swishes far out into the flat of the valley and only stops himself even there by a turn that often throw* him full length in the snow.