The forgotten story of ... Ross Milne

As this story is based in the hometown of Little Ox and I, it has special significance, especially as we were told about it while at school.


The 19-year-old skier, who was killed at the 1964 Winter Olympics, symbolised Australia's battle for credibility at the Games

Fifty years ago, on 25 January 1964, Australia suffered its greatest winter sports tragedy, when the 19-year-old skier Ross Milne was killed in practice for the downhill at the winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.

At the time Australia was very much an outsider in Alpine sport. The safety of the downhill course was called into question by some observers, but the official response to the accident laid no responsibility on the organisers. Instead, implications that Milne’s inexperience and level of skill were to blame shaded into the suggestion that countries such as Australia should not be competing against the top Europeans at all.

Those views infuriated the manager of the Australian team at the Games, John Wagner, and helped drive Milne’s brother Malcolm, 15 at the time of the accident, to prove the Europeans wrong in his own outstanding skiing career.

Australia’s representation at the 1964 Games was tiny, comprising just four male skiers – Ross Milne, Peter Brockhoff and Simon Brown, with Peter Wenzel in reserve – and two female, Christine Smith and Judith Forras. Having sent a lone skater to the 1936 Games, small Australian teams had taken part in 1952, 1956 and 1960, with generally modest results. The competitors included some extraordinarily determined and quixotic individuals, such as the speed skater Colin Hickey, who moved from Melbourne to Norway at the age of 18 and worked as a lumberjack to support himself in the sport. But they had little support and few official resources, sometimes even to the extent of being issued no uniforms.

The 1964 team went with no expectation of challenging for medals, but hoping to maintain Australia’s profile at the winter Games and lay a platform for better things in the future.

Milne, who grew up on the family’s tobacco farm at Myrtleford in Victoria, was considered comfortably the best downhiller in Australia and had competed in Europe the season before.

A profile for the Australian Women’s Weekly three months before his death portrayed him as a sunny and carefree teenager, but with a serious competitive instinct. He was reportedly “as happy at work in the tobacco fields as he is at play in the snowfields” and occupied his leisure time “water-skiing, riding one of his horses, or playing tennis”.

His team-mate Wenzel remembers Ross as “a very solid and genuine man .... He wasn’t reckless, he wasn’t foolish, he was a very steady, straightforward, good quality bloke.”

Brown told Guardian Australia: “Ross would have a go at anything … Some people you come across in sport and you think, ‘God, how’d you do that?’ and they just do it. He could do it.”

Preparations for the Innsbruck Games were hampered by an almost unprecedented lack of snow. During January the army was enlisted to truck in tonnes of it from other areas to form the skiing runs. For the downhill at Patscherkofel this helped create a lightning fast course, but with no natural protection for skiers who crashed – just bare earth, rocks and, in many places, trees lining the very edge of the piste.

On 25 January, a Saturday, Austria’s Arbeiter-Zeitung newspaper (AZ) splashed a doom-laden article across its main Olympics page under the headline “A trapeze act without a net”, warning of the dangers of the course. It was “incomparably quicker and more dangerous than in last year’s Olympic test runs”.

The paper’s reporter Martin Maier wrote: “In many places the racers come right up against the edge of the woods. And what happens if they fall and are thrown off the course? A few trees are protected by sandbags. I saw one tree where the sandbag had been placed up to three metres high, as if anticipating the force with which a racer could be catapulted off the course. Next to the piste lie raw earth, tangled trees with sharp branches, a whole arsenal of spears facing the racers.”

There was another aspect to the AZ’s fears: it singled out the “weak racers” – meaning those from non-traditional Alpine countries – as particularly vulnerable.

Certainly there was a greater disparity among the racers than would be tolerated today – a few would finish more than a minute behind the winner and the entrants included aristocratic amateurs such as the Aga Khan (skiing for Iran) and Britain’s Charles Palmer-Tomkinson, friend of Prince Charles and father of the socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.

Condescending attitudes to the less accomplished entrants were to dominate local reaction to Milne’s death.

On that Saturday morning, Milne and the other competitors had their first official training runs. He set off ahead of Brown and Brockhoff just before 11.30am.

Milne travelled no more than about 300 metres before entering one of the steepest parts of the course. As noted in the AZ, “the course here is quite straight and therefore less dangerous, but a skier sees the steep part only just before arriving there”.

As he did so, Milne was confronted with a group of skiers blocking his way. Travelling at about 60-70 km/h, he swerved to avoid them, lost control and smashed into a tree.

Brown, who had skied past the site of the crash without realising what had happened, stopped 150 metres further on, where the team’s coach told him Milne had fallen.

“I walked up and had a look at him and – well, it wasn’t too good,” Brown said.

Milne was taken from the course unconscious on a stretcher and a doctor attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as the skier was flown by helicopter to hospital. He was rushed into the operating theatre, but pronounced dead on arrival.

That afternoon an emotional service was held in the Olympic village.

“The tight-knit group of Australian competitors and the team manager, Wagner, cried like children,” the AZ reported.” They couldn’t come to terms with the fact that the happy and confident Milne was no longer with them.”

Back in Australia, Malcolm Milne had driven with his parents the three hours from Myrtleford to Melbourne, where he and his father were to catch a plane to watch Ross compete. At about 7pm, Malcolm recalls, a knock on his hotel room door brought the terrible news.

“So we stayed there overnight, packed the car up and drove home,” he told Guardian Australia. “It was just awful.”

Despite detailed reports in the Austrian press, the causes of the crash were subsequently confused and disputed. One Austrian news agency report said Milne had tried to avoid “undisciplined spectators”, a phrase that found its way into the Melbourne Age’s front-page report the following Monday.

Much more serious was the failure of the local organising committee to acknowledge the dangers of the course, on which several other competitors, including the top Frenchman Emile Viollat, suffered bad injuries.

The committee’s final 354-page report on every minute aspect of the Games found room for a single paragraph on Milne’s death, noting that the accident was “thoroughly outlined” at a meeting of team leaders, at which the clerk of the course declared: “The fatal accident happened on an entirely innocuous part of the course. The safety measures in place were far above the normal level.”

Nevertheless, extra gates were added after the crash, to slow the racers down, and more padding fixed to the trees.

"Nobody expected such an abnormal fall," the track supervisor, Ernst Spieß, said – contrary to the predictions of just such a fall in the newspaper on the morning of the crash.

An inquiry by the organisers gave no reason for Milne leaving the course except that he had “caught an edge”. It found that “the weak racer, competing above his ability, let himself be deceived by the speed of the elite and was responsible for his own fall”, the AZ summarised.

Maier wrote: “Informed sources say those in [Australian team] circles are of a different opinion.”

They were. Wagner vehemently disagreed with the official findings. In his public report after the Games he noted that the racers blocking the course had collected there “because the top part of the downhill course was overcrowded by the 100 racers who had all been allowed to train simultaneously at 11 o’clock”.

The accident might have been prevented, Wagner wrote, if the racers had been allowed onto the course at controlled intervals and had been strictly policed.

Wenzel says he felt the accusation against Milne was “a convenient argument to put”.

“I went away from those Games clear in my mind that it was a tragic accident that most likely should never have happened if there was better organisation in the training arrangements.”

But the skiers were not backed up by their own officials. Australia’s representative on the IOC, Hugh Weir, later told the Australian Olympic Federation (now the Australian Olympic Committee) that questions had been raised at Innsbruck “as to whether inexperienced people were being sent to compete in ... snow sports which contain an element of danger”. He incorrectly gave Milne’s age as 17.

In his monumental history Australia and the Olympic Games, Harry Gordon suggests Weir’s unsupportive response may have stemmed from a dismissive attitude among Australia’s Olympic hierarchy to the winter Games. He quotes Weir as saying: “I’m a summer man, myself.”

The European skiers made even more blunt assertions about Milne’s supposed lack of proficiency. Maier reported that several prominent competitors dismissed the accident brutally. “Those who can’t ski should not be here,” they said. “It was his own fault”; “he should have been paying more attention”.

That attitude still rankles with Malcolm Milne.

“I don’t like using the word cover-up, but they felt it was because of his inability,” he says. “Well, that wasn’t the case at all.”

In 2005 Malcolm was in Val d’Isère, where he says the German Wolfgang Bartels, the bronze medallist in 1964, confirmed to him that the racers stopped on the course were the principal cause of the crash, not any error on Ross’s part.

“But a lot of time went by, nothing could be done about it,” Malcolm says. “It doesn’t bring back my brother.”

The slurs made Malcolm “determined to prove to the Europeans that we could race downhill, and win”. In his second year on the European circuit, he found himself in a cable car with the great Austrian skier Karl Schranz, who had been at Innsbruck in 1964.

“Karl Schranz knew I was Australian and he said, ‘Mal, you shouldn’t be here, you’ll kill yourself like your brother did’. I thought ‘Jesus Christ, save it’.”

Malcolm Milne went on to become one of Australia’s greatest skiers and the first non-European to win a World Cup downhill, at Val d’Isère in 1969.

“I was standing at No 1 on the podium and Karl was standing below me, and I said ‘Karl, remember what you said to me when you first saw me over here?’ And he said ‘Oh no, I don’t remember that.’ It sticks in your mind when people say it like that. But he was the only one that was like that – the others were terrific.”

Ross Milne’s death naturally hit the other members of Australia’s tiny Innsbruck team hard. Peter Brockhoff withdrew from the downhill, saying, “I simply cannot compete on this course where I have lost my best friend.”

Wenzel and Brown, by contrast, felt they should race in Milne’s memory.

“I knew that Ross would have wanted me to ski in his place,” Wenzel says. “He would not have wanted to see Australia under-represented in the field through the result of the accident. Secondly, from my point of view I felt it was very important that we fielded a full team as best we could ... to demonstrate to those commentators that Australians were more than capable of skiing the course.”

There is a direct link between the 1964 team and today’s winter competitors – Peter Brockhoff’s relative Belle Brockhoff is due to compete at next month’s Sochi Games in snowboarding.

But Ross Milne will not be officially remembered, either on Saturday’s 50th anniversary of his death or at Sochi. Both the AOC and Ski & Snowboarding Australia said they had no plans to mark the occasion. The AOC account of the 1964 Games still incorrectly gives Milne’s age as 17.

Australia has come a long way in winter sport since the early days of Olympic participation, in large part thanks to the introduction of new disciplines at which it has excelled. Now a little more recognition for courageous pioneers such as Ross Milne, whose tragic death illustrated the scale of Australia’s battle for credibility, would surely not go amiss.

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blo...inter-olympics