Centennial (sort of) of Downhill Skiing

[dhermann1]

This article is in today's Guardian. Now my understanding (one of my foggy, unfootnoted recollections) was that downhill skiing as we know it today started in about 1868, when a bunch of wealthy British upper class twits . . . errr tourists brought Scandinavian skis to the Alps, where they had never been used commonly before. Instead of skiing horizontally, they thought it might be fun to slap them on skis and point themselves straight down a mountain. They were right.
This article dates it to about 1910. Whatever.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2012/dec/14/skiing-murren-history-british-centenary