Arnold Lunn

Memorial to Arnold Lunn in Mürren, Switzerland. The text reads, "It was here in Mürren that Arnold Lunn set the first slalom in 1922 and organised the first world championship in downhill and slalom racing in 1931."

Sir Arnold Lunn (born April 18, 1888 in Madras, India; died June 2 1974 in London, England) was a famous skier, mountaineer and writer. His father Henry Simpson Lunn (1859–1939, Methodist reverend and founder of Lunn's Travel agency that would become Lunn Poly) encouraged tourism in the Swiss Alps in the tradition of Thomas Cook's famous travel agency in the early 20th century.

Introduced to skiing by his father, he became a renowned skier and invented the slalom skiing race in 1922. He was the founder of the Alpine Ski Club (1908) and the Kandahar Ski Club (1924), and was the organiser of some of the most prestigious ski races in the world. He initiated in collaboration with the Austrian skiing pioneer Hannes Schneider the famous Arlberg Kandahar Challenge Cup in honour of Lord Roberts of Kandahar (Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts). Perhaps his greatest accomplishment in the skiing field was the acceptance and introduction of the Downhill and Slalom races into the Olympic Games in 1936. The double-black diamond trail named for Sir Arnold Lunn at Taos Ski Valley serves as a fitting memorial.

He attended Harrow School, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, and while he was there, founded the Oxford University Mountaineering Club.

Originally he followed his father's Methodism and, in fact, was at first a public opponent of Catholicism. After a debate with Ronald Knox, he gradually but completely changed his religious convictions, eventually embracing the same Catholic beliefs he once had deplored. In 1933, Knox himself received Lunn into the Catholic Church. Lunn remained a prolific and effective writer of Catholic apologetics for the rest of his long life, and won the applause of fellow Catholic authors like Hilaire Belloc.

He was knighted for "services to British Skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations" in 1952.

His writings include:

• The Harrovians, 1913.
• The Mountains of Youth, 1924.
• Switzerland and the English, 1944.
• Mountains and Memory, 1948.
• The Kandahar-Story, 1969.