Skiing shows formula one how to get off the slippery slope

Ski racing came back to terrestrial television last weekend, and suddenly the onset of winter seemed a little more bearable. It will take some time to get used to tuning in on Saturday mornings rather than Sunday afternoons, but the schedulers at Channel 4, having infuriated many by abandoning the Tour de France, are likely to regain a certain amount of credibility through their coverage of an equally absorbing sport.

For a decade or more, BBC2's Ski Sunday was unmissable. Like many of us, the BBC was hooked on downhill racing by a single event - Franz Klammer's immortal 1min 45.73sec slither to icy glory at Innsbruck in the 1976 Winter Olympics, a juddering, shuddering rollercoaster ride which made believers out of a generation of armchair skiers. Some of us were even forced out of the armchair and on to the piste to grapple with the eternal mysteries of the parallel turn, and to learn at first hand the meaning of a torn cruciate ligament.

Ski Sunday started in January 1978 with a white-out in Wengen, but throughout the 80s it offered a cavalcade of heroes and wonderful races. When Klammer retired, after one final imperious hurrah at Kitzbühel in 1984, others were there to take over: the rubber-suspended Marc Giardelli; Peter Müller, the masked Swiss who flew into the scenery 15 metres from victory at the Lauberhorn; Pirmin Zurbriggen, the quiet stylist who won back-to-back Hahnenkamm races on consecutive days; Michael Mair, the Italian heavyweight who thundered down the slopes like a runaway Alpine cowshed; and Billy Johnson, the Californian punk known to the haughty Austrians as " die Nasenbohrer " (the Nosepicker) until he stayed in his aerodynamic egg-tuck long enough to trounce them at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984.

Among the women, we enjoyed the battles between Maria Walliser and Michela Figini, team-mates from opposite ends of Switzerland. When Figini took the Olympic title, Walliser responded by winning the world championship at Crans- Montana on a sparkling sunlit afternoon drenched in emotion. It was like watching Gabriela Sabatini slug it out with Arantxa Sanchez Vicario.

For a while back then, it even seemed possible that a British downhiller would win a World Cup race. But Martin Bell's three top-10 places in the winter of 1985-86 flattered to deceive, and neither he nor his feisty brother Graham ever made it to the podium.

And then, in any event, skiing drifted off the radar screen. A series of warm winters in the late 80s meant that races were being cancelled more weekends than not, which meant death to television coverage. The slalom races were not as badly affected, but they weren't the same thing at all, even when Alberto Tomba emerged to reproduce the mastery of the great Ingmar Stenmark.

Once again this year many ski resorts around the world are holding their breath and praying that snow will come to save their winter. But technology has moved on since those winters of the late 80s, and now the machinery for making artificial snow can be guaranteed to produce a raceable surface in almost any conditions short of an outright heatwave.

The benefit was obvious at Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies last Saturday, when Channel 4 took the plunge and were rewarded by a fine race on a good piste flanked by bare brown trees and green meadows. It was won by Stephan Eberharter, the first of six Austrians to finish in the top 10 and also the first to use a clever trick to outwit a new device introduced to improve the racing.

Just as formula one is trying to shuffle the cars on the grid in an attempt to produce less predictable racing, so the ski federation has devised a starting procedure that sends the fastest 30 from the third and final training run out in reverse order - meaning that the fastest man, starting 30th, will have to cope with snow carved up by 29 predecessors.

Eberharter, fastest over the first two training runs, looked like repeating the feat in the final run, only to brake severely just before the finish line, putting him down into 15th place but lifting him to the 15th starting slot.

If the millionaires of formula one want to see what can happen to a sport that loses its personalities and its appeal, they should examine the last 10 years of downhill ski racing and shiver with apprehension.

But soon, with any luck, they may also be shown the good stuff that can happen when that sport gets its act together again.