My father grew up close to the mountains in Traunstein, and it soon became his favorite pastime with the family to hike up the mountains and in the winter to use their cross-country skis,” explains Willy Bogner Jr., of a time before his birth. “When my mother came into the picture, she was an innocent tourist who fell in love with the top athlete. Pretty soon she found herself going skiing quite often, and realized that the clothing left a lot to be desired — especially for women.”
That’s the genesis of Bogner the brand, skiwear’s most iconic clothing line. Willy Senior and a friend of his set up the Bogner company in 1932, importing Norwegian skis, accessories, and knitwear. When Senior competed in the 1936 Winter Olympics, he and the German team were wearing windbreakers designed by Maria Bogner. Bogner Junior, for a time only a spectator, would follow in the tracks of both of his parents — as star athlete and athletic wear designer — but he would add some panache of his own.
On the hill, Bogner became a member of the German Olympic ski team at 18 and again at 22. Unlike his father, an 11-time German champion in nordic combined, the son competed in alpine racing, becoming a three-time German junior champion in slalom and combined.
During his first Olympics — the 1960 winter games in Squaw Valley — Bogner recorded the action using a 16mm movie camera on permanent loan from his father. Because no journalists were allowed to enter the Olympic Village, “I was asked by German TV to produce a little documentary, which I did, and thus got my first contact with the professional filmmakers.” And just like that, a second career began.
One Olympiad later, Bogner was good enough to try his hand at directing and producing a feature film of his own, and he brought a crew of world-renowned skiers to St. Moritz in April 1964. He wanted to show the magic of skiing to the world.
Bogner was in the lead along the off-piste slopes of Val Selin, a dozen skiers strung along behind him. The snow cracked a few feet to his left.
Bogner jumped free of the slide, but soon avalanches broke loose on both sides of the valley, and champion German skier Barbi Henneberger — Bogner’s fiancée — and American racing legend Buddy Werner were both caught in the rush of snow. Werner was 28, the just-retired best American ski racer of his generation. Henneberger was 23 and coming back from a severe injury, beginning to win races again.
“This probably was the most ‘revolutionary’ incident in my life up to that time,” Bogner says, with 47 years now between him and that avalanche, “especially because I was the first of the skiers going down that slope, and I escaped miraculously. An experience like this at the age of 22 is definitely a wake-up call for one’s values in life, and everything else.” He and his crew debated whether to finish the film, one in which they were “trying to communicate with the world about the beauty of our sport.” Instead, the world had read about the merciless, uncaring grandeur of the mountains in the pages of Time and Life.
“We decided that it would have been also the wish of our friends who died to complete the project,” he recalls. “We dedicated the film to the memory of our friends.”
The film was Ski Fascination, the first of Bogner’s more than 30 films — depending on how you count of the ski scenes in four James Bond movies. His life and passion, in tragedy and triumph, is recorded on film. But that’s only half the story.
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