Selling Glamour

When Skier Karl Schranz returned to Austria last week from Japan, where he had been barred from competition in the Winter Olympics, he got a hero's welcome from 100,000 Viennese --more than had turned out to see either John F. Kennedy or Queen Elizabeth II. The singing, cheering crowds demonstrated a sound instinct for commercial values. A disproportionate share of Austria's money and jobs comes from the skimaking industry, with a mighty boost from the prestige of ski champions like Schranz.

Austria is a small country (pop. 7.4 million) that lives by its wits and its scant resources. One of those resources is a reservoir of expertise in skimaking, which equips a leisure-time activity that is growing phenomenally all over the world. The number of skiers in all countries has jumped from an estimated 3,000,000 since World War II to the present 15 million. The Austrian ski industry now makes more than a quarter of all the world's skis. Last year 230 Austrian firms exported about $80 million in ski equipment and clothing, more than three times sales in 1965. This year Austria's (and the world's) largest skimaker, Josef Fischer, expects to produce 700,000 pairs of skis, a tenfold increase since 1951. Its major competitors are the firms of Franz Kneissl, which makes 300,000 pairs, Anton Arnsteiner (280,000) and Alois Rohr-moser (250,000).

Searching the Slopes. All four firms have learned to sell glamour as well as craftsmanship. Kneissl, for which Schranz has worked since he was a teenager, claims that its skis have helped capture 16 Olympic medals. It urges its salesmen to "mention our victories in your sales talks." Like its competitors, Kneissl regularly sends out talent scouts to search the mountainsides for promising 12-and 13-year-olds, whom it hires as apprentices, sends to secondary school and trains to be champion skiers.

Inevitably, the ethics of amateur skiing have been altered by the strain of the sponsors' competition. In the 1950s, Austrian Ski Star Toni Sailer supposedly earned a modest $1,200 a year from advertising. Eventually he dropped out of competition after the International Ski Federation investigated his role in Sailer-Tex, an Italian textile firm to which he had lent his name. "I hoped that my leaving would be understood as a protest against the hypocrisy of the so-called amateur status," Sailer said recently. "But the situation has only become worse."

Indeed it has. Today, Karl Schranz is said to make $60,000 a year from various promotional activities. As the roaring crowds that welcomed him last week illustrate, few of his countrymen mind. One possible reason is that Austria's skimakers will need all the help that they can get from the champions whom they sponsor in order to hold on to their market share against tightening foreign competition.

In recent years, several leading ski manufacturers in Italy, Germany and Switzerland have been acquired by British and American firms. The Austrian skimakers, who for the most part are the sons of the cartmakers and carpenters who started the business, have thus far resisted the temptation to sell out. "I am worth more every day," boasts "Toni" Arnsteiner, himself a former ski racer. "So why should I sell?" He foresees, however, that "in a few years, ten manufacturers will remain the world over. The problem is to be among them."

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