- US-VT-LT001
- Personne
- fl. 1960s-
Thomas "Tom" Leroy was an American freestyle skier and ski instructor known for his skiing in the films Ski the Outer Limits (1968), Happening in White (1969), The Moebius Flip (1969), and The White Search (1970). After doing a somersault during glacier training in Austria on skis, Austrian emigré and fellow ski-instructor Hermann Göllner began performing the feat at Killington, VT, where Leroy was an instructor, and experimenting with other tricks. This attracted the attention of Tom, and they soon began performing in front of an audience. Göllner and Leroy inspired each other to set new personal bests: in 1965 the Austrian achieved the first double back flip and in 1967, the first triple forward flip on skis. Due to the enthusiastic interest of the spectators, the Hart Skis Demonstration Team of Art Furrer and Roger Staub became aware of the two and signed them. In the years that followed, several short films were made in cooperation with Summit Films, directed by Roger Brown and Bary Corbet. In 1968, the ski acrobats performed somersaults on Corbet's Couloir, a steep rocky gully near Jackson Hole, WY in the film Ski the Outer Limits. A year later, they starred in Gunter Sachs's Happening in White. They then made their best-known film appearance in 1969's The Moebius Flip. The eponymous jump consists of a simple forward somersault (front flip) with a twist and was named by the filmmakers in reference to the Möbius strip and its researcher August Ferdinand Möbius. The 28-minute short film with a psychedelic frame story made the young freestyle sport even more popular. Together with Hermann Göllner, Tom Leroy is considered a pioneer of freestyle skiing, especially the aerials discipline, which has been an Olympic discipline since 1994. While Stein Eriksen had been performing simple forward flips on skis since 1953, the two ski instructors not only increased the number of turns, but were also the first to dare to do back flips.