Remember Ski Ballet?

The 1970s gave us Disco and the rise of a showy, competitive sport called ski ballet.

Ski Ballet, sometimes referred to as Acroski, featured alpine skiers in an on snow competition, blended with nuances of figure skating or gymnastics. It was classified as a freestyle skiing event. The sport was not about downhill speed. Instead, skiers moved gracefully across the snow, linking series of turns, jumps and tricks, all choreographed to 90 seconds of music. Their ski apparel sometimes bordered on theatrical and on occasion props came into the routine.

Scoring the skiers also resembled gymnastics and figure skating, because points were awarded for both artistry and technical skill. A perfect score was 100 points. Similar to skating, there was even pairs form of ballet skiing.

I remember watching athletes linking 1-legged 360s on the snow, and balancing on the tips of their skis, if only for a moment. I'm pretty sure I recall hula hoops and ribbons as props, much like rhythmic gymnastics.

If you tried to repeat these maneuvers on your own skis, you might find yourself knotted up like a pretzel. Traditional length skis weren't meant for ski ballet. Instead the sport called for shorter skis, often 120-150cm, longer poles and more forgiving boots.

Ski Ballet's Popularity

Ski Ballet grew in the 1980s. It reached it's heyday as an Olympic demonstration sport in the 1988 and 1992 Winter Olympics.

Perhaps the best known ski ballet competitor is Suzy Chaffee. She had a successful and Olympic alpine downhill career before moving to Ski Ballet. She was also a model and actress and garnered the knickname, Suzy Chapstick, after skiing in a Chapstick commercial.

The clip below from her induction into the Vermont Ski Hall of Fame gives a good representation of ski ballet.

What Happened to Ski Ballet?

The sport didn't win favor with the Olympic committee to become a competition sport. Perhaps the sport's demise had more to do with new developments in skiing, rooted in snowboarding.

As snowboarding became more popular in snow sports it brought the rise of terrain parks with features like rails and pipes. These surfaced in the 1980s, and became fairly common in the 1990s. So just as ski ballet was at it's peak and getting international attention as a demonstration sport, skiers who wanted to do tricks, jumps and turns had entirely new ways to try stunts and push boundaries. The gradual surfaces for ski ballet competition paled in appeal to the alpine pitch of terrain parks. A new generation of skiers were hooked on creating new skills.

Ski Ballet was dropped from competitive freestyle skiing by the International Ski Federation in 2000. The sport faded away while new sports grew out of the terrain parks. Ski Cross became an Olympic Sport in 2010 and Slopestyle debuted at the 2014 Olympics.

You can still spot a skier working their ballet moves on the mountain every once in a while. But, without support for competition at a meaningful level and without ski manufacturers producing ballet gear, ski ballet is unlikely to rise again.

Other ski disciplines will continue to evolve in competitive popularity. Ski Mountaineering debuts at the 2026 Olympics coming up in Italy.