History of cross-country skiing
A skiing Lappish woman or a goddess. Olaus Magnus
Cross-country skiing originated in Fennoscandian countries in prehistoric times. It was still widely practiced in 19th century as a way of moving from place to place in winter. Elks, deers and other animals were hunted by skiing. Nowadays almost everyone in Finland and Norway have and regularly use skis.
Skiing may have also been practiced by Native Americans for similar lengths of time, although the Norwegian emigrants Snowshoe Thompson and Jackrabbit Johannsen are widely credited for introducing the sport to North America.
This form of skiing has been used by explorers by means of transport, and all Nordic armies have ski-trained infantry for winter operations. Skies gave important mobility to the Finnish army in Winter War that allowed the small groups of Finns to beat large armies of Russians. Similar tactics that utilizes skies has been used in many times by the Finns and Karelians in the past. Pre-modern skiing troops were armed with crossbows and ski poles which had a spearhead on the other end.
Traditionally, all of the equipment was made of natural materials: wooden skis and bamboo poles with leather hand straps. Footwear was usually sturdy leather boots with thick soles. Bindings evolved from simple straps made of twisted wood-based thread, to the so-called Kandahar binding with the fastening of both the boot’s front and back, to the ‘Rat Trap’ front-only binding, which is today known as the Nordic norm, and has evolved in various modern bindings.
This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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