Buddy Werner: The Best Who Never Got to Prove It

Wallace Werner, known to everyone as Buddy, was born in Steamboat Springs on March twenty-fourth, nineteen thirty-six, and learned to ski on Howelsen Hill before he was old enough to read. By his early twenties he was competing on the European circuit, one of the very few Americans the European ski world took seriously. In nineteen fifty-nine he became the first skier from outside Austria or Switzerland ever to win the Hahnenkamm downhill at Kitzbühel, the most prestigious single-day race in alpine skiing. He won the United States national giant slalom championship in nineteen fifty-seven, nineteen fifty-nine, and nineteen sixty-three, and added the national downhill title in nineteen sixty-three as well.

Werner competed in three Winter Olympics, in nineteen fifty-six, nineteen sixty, and nineteen sixty-four. He never won an Olympic medal, but he raced at a level that put him on equal footing with the Europeans who dominated the sport. He was twenty-eight years old when the nineteen sixty-four Games concluded, still at the peak of his racing years and widely expected to contend for a medal at the next Olympics.

He died on April twelfth, nineteen sixty-four, on a mountainside above St. Moritz, Switzerland. He was there to film sequences for a ski film called Ski Fascination, directed by Willy Bogner. An avalanche swept the slope. Werner and Bogner's fiancée, Barbi Henneberger, a German Olympic skier, outran the first wave but were caught by a second. Both were killed. Werner was twenty-eight years old.

Steamboat Springs renamed the ski mountain above town in his honor in nineteen sixty-five. It has been Mount Werner ever since.