Serge Lang (skiing)

Serge Lang
Serge Lang, founder of the alpine skiing World Cup
Born	June 6, 1920 Mulhouse, France
Died	November 21, 1999 Sternenberg, France
Occupation	Journalist
Nationality	France
Subject	Alpine skiing, cycling

Serge Lang (June 6, 1920 – November 21, 1999) was a French journalist, alpine skier, and the founder of the alpine skiing World Cup. As a journalist he covered alpine skiing, cycling, and other sports for five major publications. In the mid-1960s, he envisioned a season-long series of ski races, which became the World Cup skiing circuit. He continued to guide the growth of the World Cup and the sport of ski racing over the next two decades.

Jean-Jacques "Serge" Lang was born in June 1920 in Mulhouse, Alsace, in eastern France. He moved with his parents to Switzerland in 1921, where his father Albert became director of the French train station located in Basel. Lang learned to ski before the age of 7 in Markstein, in the Vosges Mountains with his father Albert and his mother, Friedl. He competed in ski races during his youth.

During World War II, he remained in Switzerland and worked as a journalist in Basel, where he also founded a film festival named "le Bon Film" with his friend Peter Baechlin. After the war he covered the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 and, along with Ernst von Schenck, provided analytical commentary for the memoirs of Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi Germany's chief racial theoretician, who was executed in October of that year. As a correspondent for the leading French evening paper Le Soir, Lang also attended a variety of sporting events after reporting on the 1948 Winter Olympics at St. Moritz, especially alpine skiing and cycling.

In the mid-1960s, he had the idea for a season-long series of ski races with a points system to determine a champion after being requested by former Tour de France and sportspaper L'Équipe director Jacques Goddet to "invent somethings which would help our readers to better understand ski racing alpine circuit". A few months earlier, Lang had attended the very successful 'Nations Team Event' at Vail, Colorado, where the three best teams of the 1964 Olympics at Innsbruck had been invited by former US Alpine Director Bob Beattie to enter a newly launched team competition. It was such an exciting event that Serge Lang was convinced afterwards it was time to greatly enlarge the horizon of alpine ski racing mostly limited to central Europe during the winter season. In December 1965, L'Équipe launched the first (unofficial) European ski circuit named "Trophée de L'Equipe", which was won by France's Marielle Goitschel and Austria's Karl Schranz. Lang, after discussing it with some of his friends Bob Beattie, the US Alpine Director, and Honoré Bonnet, Head Coach of the French Ski Team, during a downhill training session of the famous "Hahnenkamm" races at Kitzbühel, Austria, in January 1966, decided that it should become a world tour. He choose to name it the "World Cup" after the football (soccer) world championships held in England in 1966, which were the first to be called World Cup.