James Riddell (skier)

W. James Riddell MBE (27 December 1909 – 2 February 2000) was a British champion skier and author who was involved in the early days of skiing as a competitive sport and holiday industry. Like his near contemporary, Sir Arnold Lunn, he matched his adventurism on the slopes and knowledge of the Alpine countries with an elegant record of his times.

In 1929, he raced for Britain at Zakopane, Poland, in the first international downhill race, having got the reluctant backing of the International Ski Federation, and finished eighth among 60 racers. In the same year, he won the Kandahar Club's Muerren Inferno, still the longest and most demanding of amateur downhill races. He was British national champion in 1935 and vice-captain to Arnold Lunn's son, Peter, at the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

He worked with Lunn and the Kandahar Ski Club to overcome Scandinavian objections to downhill-only skiing: they saw the sport being as much uphill as down. Finally, Alpine skiing was admitted at Garmisch, but only on the basis of combined results in downhill and slalom, a word coined by Lunn for a race with shorter, sharper turns through gates of twin poles.

Riddell was a winter sports polymath. In 1930, he had skied at 127.96 km an hour in the Flying Kilometre at St Moritz, and, moving over to its Olympic jump, vaulted nearly 50m. In the Garmisch Olympic downhill, which was part of the Olympic combined event, he crashed into a tree, catapulted into a river and badly injured his back.

Riddell was born in Wandsworth. Educated at Harrow School, he played cricket against Eton at Lord's and performed strongly for the cross-country team. At Clare College, Cambridge, he read modern languages, but took a year out to practise gorilla and cheetah photography in the Belgian Congo and Kenya, interspersed with writing children's books and publicity activities for De Havilland, Selfridges and Fortnum and Mason.

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