Published in Good Ski Guide magazine, December 2003

Feel the burn

Thought to be the longest downhill in the world, Mürren's Inferno has become a skiing institution. Our very own boy racer, William Ham Bevan, joins the 1,800 waiting to hurl themselves into the abyss

IT'S ONE of the most common motifs in nightmares, apparently: the sudden realisation that you’re wearing totally inappropriate dress for your surroundings. Some people might dream that they’re walking down the street in their underpants; others, that they’ve inadvertently gone into a job interview wearing a ‘Skiers do it spread-eagled’ T-shirt.

I’d imagine that forgetting one’s costume at a Franz Klammer theme party is a less common variation, but this is the situation I found myself in at the summit of the Schilthorn, about a vertical kilometre above Mürren. Worse still, however much I pinched myself, I didn’t seem to be able to wake up.

I was in the queue of competitors sideslipping toward the starting gate for the 60th Inferno race – allegedly the longest downhill race in the world. Everyone else in the line was clad from neck to ankle in a shiny, skin-tight condom. I, on the other hand, had my usual baggy blue jacket and loose ski pants, an ensemble that must have a similar aerodynamic index to a bouncy inflatable castle.

Likewise, I appeared to be the only one sporting stubby carving skis instead of two-metre-long racing planks. Although I didn’t have a Union jack on my (borrowed) crash helmet like Konrad Bartelski, I sensed that a lot of people twigged that I was British.

As the line shuffled forward, with racers catapulting themselves into the abyss at 12-second intervals, I once again wondered how the hell this had come about. The starting order for the Inferno is normally dictated by one’s results in previous races. This being my first time, I’d expected to begin toward the end of the 1,800-strong field, amidst the pick ‘n’ mix of chancers and no-hopers. But somewhere along the line, something had gone awry, and I had been assigned a start number of 341.

This placed me right up among the headbangers from ski clubs with names like ‘Sadism Luzern’ or ‘Blitzen Schnöffelbonker’. The official line is that this had happened because my application was received late, but I maintain there was a sadistic glint in the eye of the race office assistant the previous day.

That night, I had satisfied race superstition by following the traditional Inferno parade, in which an effigy of the Devil is carried through the village, before being torched to the accompaniment of fireworks. Old Nick’s head had miraculously survived the flames intact, and the consensus among race veterans was that this was a bad omen. I suspect some of them even blamed me for it.

Auguring yet worse was the news that the top traverse of the course had been closed, due to avalanche danger. One quirk of the Inferno race is that there is an uphill section, where racers are expected to run up the slope in their skis. Now that the course had been rerouted, there would be two of these climbs to negotiate. Given that I can barely make it up the stairs to my office without going into hyperventilation, this was likely to turn out problematic. And I had arrived only that day, so the race would be my first ski run of the year so far. My only chance was some last-minute training. Time to hit the beers.

By the time I left the Tächi Bar of the Eiger Hotel in the none-too-early hours, I had managed to glean little practical information about the Inferno race, save that very few people actually died through taking part. I was told that the race had been founded by Sir Arnold Lunn of the Kandahar Ski Club in 1928, and that many of the Brits in the bar would be racing under the club’s flag. I was also very quickly marked as Not Quite Our Sort due to my pronunciation of ‘Kandahar’. There is, I came to learn, a secondary stress on the final syllable – ‘Kanda-har’ – that serves as a Masonic handshake for members.

Fast forward seven hours, one missed breakfast, three frantic wake-up calls and a cable-car trip to Blofeld’s lair at the Piz Gloria, and there I was at the starting gate. A bottle of schnapps was tethered to the side of the gate for last-minute Dutch courage, which I declined; from the look on the face of the race attendant, the alcohol-by-volume content of my breath may have been considerably higher. Then it was into the familiar Ski Sunday beep-beep-beep, and a sudden panic as to whether my bindings (adjusted to a wimpy DIN setting of six) would survive a racing start. Unfortunately, they did.

I don’t propose to dwell on the race itself, any more than I’d write at length about my last root canal treatment. Three people swept past me on the initial schuss alone, and by the time I had reached the first uphill section, I might as well have had a rotating yellow lamp on my helmet and a large ‘keep right’ sign attached to my back, like a motorway gritting lorry.

That was merely embarrassing, though. The first climb was just excruciating. I ran up in herringbone steps for about ten yards, dropped to a walking pace, and presently turned around to sidestep up instead. In the end, lungs bursting, I just had to stop. While panting my way back to mobility, I thought, why waste the opportunity?, and got my camera out to take a few snaps of the competitors running up the hill past me. The fact that I did not appear to be taking the race seriously seemed to enrage one of them, who violently shook his fist at me as he went past. I waved back, and felt slightly better.

After the climb, my legs were finished, so I maintained a leisurely pace down the remainder of the course, keeping my speed down with one or two extra turns. The ‘Gun Barrel’, a thin traverse with a netted-off precipice to one side, proved far less terrifying than I’d been led to believe; but was probably more so for the two racers who screeched around the corner to find this slow vehicle crawling along the hard shoulder ahead of them. Suffice to say the second climb was marginally less fun than the first – or, I’d imagine, than death by firing squad.

There is one hairpin bend, toward the end of the course, where crowds gather to watch the racers. On my appearance, the spectators reacted like a Formula One crowd faced with a Hillman Imp chugging past in the middle of Schumacher and Frentzen. From there, it was a straightforward limp home to Mürren. After crossing the finish, I immediately ripped off my number bib to reveal the blue ‘Press’ one underneath and melted into the crowd. Nobody saw me; nobody could prove anything.

So I thought. Unfortunately, the printout of the race rankings turned up while I was having a drink in the hotel lobby that evening with some of the other UK contingent. One of them immediately swiped it, and the game was up. After flicking nearly all the way back to the appendix, we found my name alongside a pitiful race time of 28 minutes, 25 seconds, and a place in the finishing order in the mid 1,400s. Could any dignity be salvaged?

Well, there it was, in black and white – not only had I put in a marginally quicker time than one member of the Kandahar Club, it was one of the Lunn dynasty, founders of the race. With no small measure of smugness, I pointed this out to a club grandee nearby. ‘Why, yes, so you have,’ he said. ‘Well done. Of course, Peter Lunn is 88 years old now, you know, so he’s not as fast as he used to be.’

Inferno? Too right – it’s hell on Earth.