The First Hundred Metre Ski Flight: Planica, 1936
1936 · event
On 15 March 1936, in the alpine valley of Planica in north western Slovenia, the Austrian jumper Josef Bradl landed a jump of just over one hundred metres. It was the first time in history that a human being had travelled that far through the air on skis, and the crowd in the valley knew exactly what they had seen. The number was not only a record. It broke a barrier that many in the sport had insisted was beyond the limits of the human body.
The hill that made it possible was the work of the Slovenian engineer Stanko Bloudek, who had designed a profile far larger than anything then in use, built into the steep slope beneath the Ponce peaks. Planica sits at the end of a narrow valley in the Julian Alps, and its shape gives jumpers a long, stable flight. In the years that followed the same hill produced record after record, and a new discipline separated itself from ordinary ski jumping and took the name ski flying.
The valley became a fixture of the sport. A larger hill designed by the brothers Vlado and Janez Gorisek opened in the late 1960s and has held the world record many times since. Every March tens of thousands of people walk into Planica for the final competitions of the season, and Slovenian jumpers have won there in front of them.
For a small nation Planica is more than a sports venue. It is a place where an idea about what is possible was revised in public, in a single afternoon, and where the sport has kept coming back to test the next limit. The first hundred metre flight of 1936 is the moment the valley points to when it explains itself.