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."

Before then, he had also become a leading authority in international skiing through his participation in the International Federation of Ski (FIS). He represented Great Britain in the FIS from 1928 to 1949, and in 1930 he drafted Downhill and Slalom racing rules and help them to be accepted by the FIS. But 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.

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. He was the founder of the Alpine Ski Club (1908) and the Kandahar Ski Club (1924), the editor of the British Ski Year Book, and the organiser of some of the most prestigious ski races in the world.

Introduced to skiing by his father, Arnold Lunn became a renowed skier and invented the slalom skiing race in 1922. 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).

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

He caused Murren to become a national and international center for ski racing, and he was knighted for "services to British Skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations" in 1952.

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.

His writings include:

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