Ski jumping legend Alf Engen helped put Utah's powder on the map
Athlete of the Century
By Bianca Dumas
Alf Engen was a ski jumper so remarkable, he broke the world record several times in a single day of competition—more than once. He was the first man to scout out Alta for a ski resort; the ski school, restaurant and Alta's most fabled, expert run still bear his name.
He was a stunt double for movie stars, a ski racing promoter and an Olympic coach. He was an inductee into four halls of fame, was named Skier of the Century, and is the subject of an entire museum housing his 500 trophies and awards.
But it all seems to have come together by chance. Born in Norway, Engen arrived in the United States in 1929 and took up work as a drill press operator in a Chicago factory.
"He came to America with the idea that he'd try to make some money and go back to Norway again," said Alf Engen's son, Alan, an accomplished skier and ski historian who lives with his wife, Barbara, in Salt Lake City. "Dad got involved with skiing again just by accident."
Alf and his brother, Sverre, had been skiers in Norway, but here in America, they were working as laborers so they could send financial support to their widowed mother. All that would change on a fateful day when Alf was invited to observe a ski jumping event in Milwaukee.
Alf wasn't meant for the sidelines and, in short order, he coaxed an older man into letting him borrow a set of jumping skis. Going against what he must have thought was his better judgment, the older man handed over the skis, and Alf trudged up the hill in his town clothes past a crowd of murmuring spectators.
When he got to the top, Alf used leather thongs to tie his street shoes to the jumping skis, got into position and went down the hill. His form perfect, he landed at the very bottom. The spectators were silenced.
Soon after, a representative of the Norge Ski Club of Chicago asked if the Engen brothers would like to join the newly established pro ski jumping circuit. They decided for strategic reasons that Alf would go pro while Sverre would compete as an amateur. They won their first meets, and they never stopped winning.
The brothers jumped in tournaments and exhibitions all across America. Together with their youngest brother, Corey, who arrived from Norway four years later, they would ultimately amass 1,000 combined trophies—half of those being Alf's alone—while helping to kick-start the then-nascent Utah ski industry.
The Meister
Alf Engen's success as a ski jumper is almost too enormous to describe. He won the National Ski Jumping Champion title eight times between 1931 and 1946—snagging the win on borrowed skis during that final year. He once jumped off a takeoff he knew had been built at a dangerously steep angle to demonstrate that it wasn't safe for other jumpers. He broke a ski during his landing, but landed all the same.
In Utah, Alf and Sverre Engen were best known for the ski jumping contests at Ecker Hill, near Parleys Summit. There, on New Year's Day in 1931, Alf broke the world record twice in one day. Later that year, he broke the world record four times in one day. But these records didn't count, because the first tournaments weren't sanctioned by the Western America Winter Sports Association. So in February of 1932, Alf made a jump in a sanctioned tournament at Big Pines, California, which formally gave him the world's distance title.
Having been raised in the ski culture of Norway, Alf was a natural in the Nordic disciplines—he won the National Classic Champion title for combined cross country and jumping in 1939 and 1941. But he didn't learn to ski alpine courses until the age of 30.
In his book, Skiing: A Way of Life, Sverre Engen tells the story of the first time his brother Alf entered a slalom race, coaxed into the competition by friends. He didn't know how to make the turns to go through the gates, so he'd throw himself down, slide past the gate on his rump, then get up and ski to the next point. But he learned quickly, and not long after earned the title of Ski Meister—someone who can ski at a championship level in each of the four disciplines of skiing: jumping, downhill, slalom and cross country. Alf won this title at the National 4-Way Championship in 1940 and 1941.
"You usually look upon skiing as you were either a Nordic specialist or Alpine," Alan Engen said. "There were very few that were really great in all four disciplines. Dad was probably, as far as I know, the only individual in winter sport that has ever won a gold medal in every single event. And he didn't do it just once, he did it twice."
This record makes Alf the only known double-crowned Ski Meister. Equipment and training have become so specialized that this competition is no longer held on the national level.
The Olympian
Although he carried a title indicating that he was the greatest skier of his time, technicalities and runs of bad luck kept Alf Engen out of the Olympics. So, he entered a competition that brought the Olympics to him.
In 1937, Alf skied in the U.S. National Ski Jumping Championships on Ecker Hill, where the competition may have been of higher caliber than the Olympics. One newspaper reporter wrote: "Not even the field at the 1932 Olympic Games at Lake Placid rivals the collection of 25 Class A riders, headed by Sigmund Ruud, famous Norwegian whose presence lends international flavor to the competition."
By tournament's end, Alf Engen had beaten Ruud and was credited with a new American amateur distance record. During the awards presentation, Ruud commented, "Alf Engen is the most powerful jumper I have ever seen. He is a greater competitor even than they say."
Finally, in 1948, at nearly 40 years old, Alf Engen qualified as a member of the Olympic team but was asked to be head coach instead. Under Coach Alf, the U.S. earned its first-ever gold medal for skiing, when Gretchen Fraser won the women's slalom.
On the way home from the Olympics, Alf put the icing on his ski jumping cake. He and his wife, Evelyn, stopped in Norway, where a number of ski tournaments were being held. Alf was invited to a meet at a jumping hill near his hometown of Mjøndalen. A sign there said, "The record on this hill was set in 1928 by Alf Engen and still stands." Alf was invited to jump again, and he did. He landed in the same spot where he'd set the hill record 20 years before.
The Teacher
After the Olympics, Alf and Evelyn Engen came back to Salt Lake City and made Alta their home. There, Alf would teach at a ski school that would eventually bear his name.
He'd been involved in the development of Alta from the start. In Alf's younger years, the Forest Service had hired him to scout Alta as a location for a possible ski hill. Alf assessed Alta in true Norseman's style, skiing alone from the town of Brighton over Catherine Pass and dropping into the Albion basin.
He reported back that Alta would make a fine ski area, if they could only stop the avalanches. He was then named foreman on a Civilian Conservation Corps project to replant the timber that had been lost due to mining operations.
To support the state's new ski hobby, the Deseret News partnered with Alta to offer a free ski school to the public. The Deseret News' Ski School began in 1948 with Alf and Sverre Engen as lead instructors.
They trained 2,000 new skiers on the first day. The program was the largest and longest running of its type, lasting until 2001.
Nick Nichol was 6 years old when he started attending the Deseret News' Ski School, where his dad and four uncles assisted the Engen brothers as instructors. The Nichol name would become synonymous with ski instruction at Alta, and members of the family are still found on the slopes, teaching snowplow turns to beginners and deep powder turns to the more advanced.
It was instruction in powder skiing that gave Alf Engen his next accolade, and which got him inducted into the Professional Ski Instructors of America Intermountain Division Hall of Fame in 1989.
"They used to use a dipsy-doodle," Nichol said, describing a powder skiing method of transferring weight from one ski to the other as you made your way downhill. "Alf was the one who started figuring out how to put pressure on both skis at the same time."
Under Alf's instruction, Nichol became an exemplary skier and a full supervisor at the Alf Engen Ski School. He's also known for his ability to recall Alf Engen's words and retell them in Engen's signature accent.
"He told me, 'By gosh, you know, Nick, you're not gonna be the fastest skier on the mountain, but, by gosh, I'm gonna make you the prettiest,'" Nichol recalled. "Fortunately, I try not to brag, but that's exactly what he did. I had the privilege of doing all the powder skiing in five or so Alta promotional films."
Nichol also absorbed Engen's teaching style, which flowed naturally from his friendly personality. "He had a great sense of humor, but in his humor, there was a lot of wisdom," Nichol said.
He remembers Engen saying that, "by gosh," any turn made standing up is a good turn. Students would ask Engen what they were doing wrong, Nichol recalled, and Engen would start with what they were doing right and then go from there.
"You felt like you were being encouraged," Nichol said. "To me, that was the real key to teaching anyone."
Although he was a world champion and recipient of roughly 500 awards and titles, Alf Engen is now best known by many for his patience and his love of teaching children and beginners.
"He was so intent on the next generation of kids getting training," Barbara Engen said. "He'd say—in a Norwegian accent, you know—'Get 'em yumping, in the air. You get them in the air, and they can do any kind of sport.'"
During an NBC television interview, Alf Engen remarked: "Medals—I have a whole room full of medals. But to give a good ski lesson—that's what is important to me."
The Archivist
When Greg Thompson was working as associate dean for Special Collections at the University of Utah Marriott Library, he started looking into the library archives for the history of skiing in the Intermountain West. He couldn't find anything.
"I thought that was really odd," Thompson said, "given that I knew some about the history of skiing in this area, about Alf and Alta and all that stuff."
Thompson and Sue Raemer, a library employee and Alta ski instructor, thought this was a problem that needed fixing. The two knew that Alf Engen had six scrapbooks full of articles and reports about his skiing career.
"Of course we wanted to have that material in the archives," Thompson said.
When asked, Engen was willing to turn his books over to the Marriott Library as the cornerstone of a new collection of materials, and so the Utah Ski Archives was begun at the University of Utah.
Alan Engen was part of the original board of the archives, Thompson said. Almost from the very beginning of the project, he was interested in developing a ski museum. Organizers determined that the archives and museum could be two distinct programs running on parallel tracks.
In 1989, the Alf Engen Ski Museum opened in Park City—partly to honor the Engen legacy and partly to give all of Alf's trophies a permanent home. It is the most visited ski museum in the United States, with 475,000 visitors a year. Nick Nichol voices Alf, with his jolly Norwegian accent, in the audio displays.
Connie Nelson, the museum's director, says people frequently approach her with memories of Engen, remarking about his warm heart and how much he loved kids.
"That's really amazing when you come here and look at all these hundreds of trophies and consider the humble nature of Alf," she said. "He really is a legend of skiing."
Alan Engen was the museum's first chairman and president, and he's remained an active board member. Today, at age 83, he continues to be one of the Intermountain West's leading ski historians.
He's produced two books and several ski history films and articles over the years, which benefit from the rare vantage point he has.
"I feel like my role in the ski world has been as a bridge, as a bridge from the old to the new," he said, referring to his position between the founders of American skiing, whom he knew personally, and his own participation in the modern incarnation of the sport.
Alan Engen was an All-American on the University of Utah ski team and competed internationally as a member of the military CISM ski team. He became a U.S. Ski Association-Intermountain Masters champion in his later years and has twice been a torchbearer for the Olympics. Like his father and uncles before him, he was inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboarding Hall of Fame.
Alan Engen remembers tandem ski jumping with his dad in demonstration events. He once got a crazy idea he thought would wow the crowd. "Because I was a gymnast, I thought I might be able to perform a jumping feat on my hands," he said. "Dad—I guess he had enough confidence in me—he said, 'Let's give it a try.'"
Alan got into a handstand position, holding onto the ski bindings with his hands and went down the hill. He landed the jump, but crashed when he failed to clear the knoll at the bottom.
Barbara Engen remarked on a family photo of this moment. "He's standing there at the top of the jumping hill on his hands, in perfect form, and his dad's looking over at the side, like this is a great idea. Nowadays, it's like, 'What were you thinking?'"
Alan and Barbara Engen have many such stories of their time with Alf Engen and his brothers. "I miss it," Barbara said of the time the family spent together. "They were fun to be with."
Alan Engen was named director of the Alf Engen Ski School in 1992 and was able to enjoy a few more years at Alta with his dad, who passed away in 1997.
Alf Engen was posthumously named Utah's Athlete of the Century in 1999. His legacy continues at Alta, where the new Sunnyside lift has increased access to the Albion Basin—home base for families, beginners and the Alf Engen Ski School.
"I don't think anybody really follows in my dad's footsteps," Alan Engen said. "He set some really deep tracks for me to follow. I really, truly felt that of all the athletes I had the privilege of knowing in my lifetime, I thought probably my father was the one I'd like to most closely emulate."
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