Oslo 1952 Winter Olympians are the first recipients of Snow Australia Medals

Today Snow Australia has the honour of unveiling the first recipients of the Snow Australia Medal, the legacy award that celebrates the careers of those athletes who represented our country at the highest level of the sport.

The first five recipients of the Snow Australia Medal all represented Australia at the 1952 Oslo Olympic Winter Games: Bob Arnott (Alpine), Bill Day (Alpine), Bruce Haslingden (Cross-Country), Barry Patten (Alpine) and Cedric Sloane (Cross-Country).

The Oslo Olympics marked only the second time that Australia had sent a team to the Winter Games, sixteen years after speed-skating trailblazer Kenneth Kennedy had worn the green and gold at the 1936 Winter Olympics. In total, Australia sent nine athletes to Oslo, participating in Figure Skating and Speed Skating as well as Alpine and Cross-Country skiing.

The Olympic Winter Games looked very different in that era. Alpine and Cross-Country skiing were the only snow-sport events on the Olympic program and the Australian team members were amateurs with limited training resources. Their preparation had to be fitted around work commitments, and for some of them the two activities overlapped. Bruce Haslingden worked as a sheep grazier in Cooma and recognised that the time spent mustering herds had been an integral part of his physical training. 

Australian winter resorts were not as established as they are today and the lifting capacity was still minimal. Alpine skiers still had to walk up the slopes they intended to train on - a predicament that made them very fit, but did not necessarily constitute the best training strategy to compete at international level.

For the 1952 Australian Olympians, travelling to the Games also involved a long and expensive six-week ship voyage, again not an ideal preparation for a major sporting event. When they finally competed in Oslo, Australian athletes could not match their talented competitors from European countries that had already started building a long tradition of success, with Austrian skiers dominating the Alpine races and Scandinavian nations sweeping the podiums in the Cross-Country events.

Snow Australia Medal Recipients
	William 'Bob' Arnott 1922 - 2016 Discipline: Alpine Skiing Olympic participations: Oslo 1952			William 'Bill' Day 1935 -  Discipline: Alpine Skiing Olympic participations: Oslo 1952, Cortina 1956, Squaw Valley 1960
	Edward 'Bruce' Haslingden 1922 - 2007 Discipline: Cross-Country Skiing Olympic participations: Oslo 1952			Barry Patten 1927 - 2003 Discipline: Alpine Skiing Olympic participations: Oslo 1952
	Cedric Sloane 1915 - 1992 Discipline: Cross-Country Skiing Olympic participations: Oslo 1952

The ski equipment used during that time was also vastly different from what is used today. Only in the 1960s were leather alpine boots replaced by laterally stiff plastic boots to improve edging power, and the innovations later implemented in Alpine skis - replacing wooden skis for metal, then aluminium and fibreglass - were still a few years away. Hard-shell helmets were mandatory only in the Downhill events, and without specific standards. Cross-Country ski poles were fragile and still made of aluminium.

As Bill Day was still a young and upcoming talent at the time, only launching a career that later saw him become a three-time Winter Olympian, Bob Arnott stands out as the most representative skier of the Australian team in Oslo. The Olympic Downhill was one of his favourite memories of those Games, a challenging event run on very little snow. 

“I started off behind the Greek, there were probably one-minute intervals or something like that" - later recounted Arnott. The Greek was dual-Olympian Alexandros Vouxinos, who had left the Men's Downhill start hut just before Arnott, with the bib no. 87.

"The start of the race was fairly straightforward: The Greek disappeared, and I was sent off, and we came to a traverse, it was fairly steep, and the Greek had fallen down the hill, and so I passed him. 

“Then the same thing happened to me, I fell down the hill and he passed me, and then I got up and managed to pass him again with a schuss to the finishing line”. Arnott eventually crossed the line almost two minutes ahead of Vouxinos, who finished last of the classified athletes for the event.

A published author, Bob Arnott is fondly remembered by the skiing community not only for his success on the snow, but also for his role in the international development of skiing. His 27-year long tenure within the International Ski Federation left a significant legacy in the classification system he conceived with American FIS delegate Bob Beattie: the 'Bob Rule' is still at the core of the FIS points system used to rank skiers around the world today.

Read Medallist Biographies Here