The picture doesn’t do it justice. If you’re on YouTube, look up user British Path’e and the video “World’s Most Dangerous Sport (1955)”. It’s only a minute long, and it’s nuts. lmtimes.ca/britishpathe
When you’re young, you’re indestructible—climbing trees, jumping bicycles, jumping off the swingset, etc. When everyone got a bit older, things got a bit faster and a bit more gas-powered. All of a sudden, towing a toboggan behind a snowmobile was more fun or a GT snow racer for even more intensity. Ever ride behind a pickup on a couch that’s strapped to an old car hood in the winter? Me neither, but I hear it was a thing at one point or another…
It’s not necessarily human nature for us to want to destroy ourselves, but adrenaline feels really good, it’s legal, and you don’t even need a prescription for it. UniMotorcycle racing was one of the craziest sports I’d ever heard of, where you ski behind the back half of an old motorcycle on dirt. Then there were Motorcycle Chariot Races, where two bikes were attached side-by-side, like Roman horses, and piloted by someone being towed behind them in a chariot. Not long ago, I saw skiers being towed by motorcycles on a frozen lake. After that, I saw the same thing, but with cars. Then, I saw it was an oval track. That’s full insanity.
A sketchy drag race is one thing, but an oval track? That’s nuts. The video is from Bavaria, Germany. Filmed in 1955, it shows motorcycles towing skiers around an oval on a frozen lake. It’s hard to tell from the old footage, but one person pointed out that they don’t even have studded tires. They claim speeds of up to a hundred miles per hour were reached, which is just mental to think about. What’s even crazier is seeing skiers being towed by cars around the same track. It looks like all of them are Porches, so they’re capable of serious speed. There are quite a few cars on the track, and there’s not a lot of distance between any of them.
What happens if a skier goes down? A tragedy, I would imagine. The spectators are only slightly less daring than the competitors, lining the perimeter of the track with only a small snow drift between them and the action. I wish I could find more information on this sport. How many years did they do this? When did it start? When did it end? How widespread was it? I’m guessing it was short-lived, as there’s so little information on it, but I am glad that someone was there to at least capture some of the action on film.
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk
Editors note: We used to call this type of thing bumper shining - hanging onto the back of a car in winter and letting it drag you. A quick google of that reveals that it may just be a Saskatchewan term. Another term I know is “Skitching.” Think Marty McFly at the beginning of Back to the Future (by beginning, I mean the first few minutes of the movie released first, not the chronological origin from the third film when it’s a western. Marty is late for school and, using his skateboard, hangs onto the back of a Jeep while waving at an aerobics class. Or when he sneaks out of the back seat of Biff’s car and uses his hoverboard to go around to the driver's door of Biff’s 1946 Ford convertible coupe (there, I tied it back in) to steal the Sports Almanac that 2015-Biff gave 1955-Biff, therefore correcting, and slightly improving the original 1985.
Ultimately skiing behind something of locomotion is called Skijoring. “Skijoring is a winter sport in which a person on skis is pulled by a horse, a dog, another animal, or a motor vehicle. The name is derived from the Norwegian word skikjøring, meaning "ski driving." Although skijoring is said to have originated as a mode of winter travel, it is currently primarily a competitive sport.”
