Sir Arnold Henry Moore Lunn was an alpine skier, mountaineer, and author. He was born on April 18, 1888 in Madras, India. He was the eldest of three sons and a daughter of Sir Henry Simpson Lunn and Mary Ethel Lunn (nee Moore). His father was a lay Methodist minister, but Arnod was an agnostic and wrote critically about Catholicism before he converted to that religion at the age of 45. His father also later founded Lunn's Travel Agency (that would become Lunn Poly), which encouraged tourism in the Swiss Alps. Arnold attended Orley Farm School, in Harrow, England, followed by Harrow School. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and while he was there, founded and was president of the Oxford University Mountaineering Club. Introduced to skiing by his father, Arnold invented the slalom skiing race in 1922. Towards the end of 1913, Lunn married Mabel Northcote, the granddaughter of Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh. They had three children: Peter, John, and Jaqueta. Though not keen on mountaineering, Mabel shared her husband's love of skiing. She was the first woman to pass the British First Class skiing test, and she was a founder member of the Kandahar Ski Club. When her brother became 3rd Earl of Iddesleigh in 1927, she acquired the courtesy title of "Lady Mabel". Following the First World War (1914-1918) and a hiatus in international skiing, Sir Arnold continued to winter in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland in the village of Murren. In January 1921, Arnold organized the British national ski championship at Wengen, the first national championship to include a downhill race as well as jumping and cross-country skiing. Previously, slalom style races had been decided by style, however by 1922, Lunn, convinced that there was a real need for a race designed to test a skier's ability to turn securely and rapidly on steep alpine ground, was insisting on speed being the only arbiter. On January 21, 1922, the Alpine Ski Challenge Cup, first held in 1920, was transformed into a challenge cup for slalom racing based on speed. On the practice slopes at Mürren, Lunn set pairs of flags through which the competitors had to turn, and the flags were so set as to test the main varieties of alpine ski turns. Lunn's innovation was that the winner was simply the competitor who could make his way down in the shortest time. This first slalom was won by J. A. Joannides. Sir Arnold persisted, despite doubts from the Swiss and Nordic nations, with his campaign to officially regulate and incorporate slalom into the Federation Internationale de Ski (FIS). At a FIS conference held in Oslo in 1930, the downhill and slalom racing events and their rules were accepted and the discipline of alpine skiing was officially born. Lunn was the founder of the Alpine Ski Club (1908), the Ladies Ski Club (1923) and the Kandahar Ski Club (1924), and he was the organizer of many ski races around the world. He initiated in collaboration with the Austrian skier Hannes Schneider the Arlberg Kandahar Challenge Cup in honour of Lord Roberts of Kandahar. Through his efforts, the Downhill and Slalom races were introduced into the Olympic Games in 1936, although he opposed the Winter Olympic Games of that year being held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He later wrote, "In 1936 the Olympic Committee paid Hitler the greatest compliment in their power by entrusting the Nazis with the organization of the summer and winter Olympic Games." Lunn refereed the slalom in the 1936 Winter Olympics, and his son, Peter, was the captain of the British ski team, but neither marched in the opening procession or attended the lavish banquet organized by the Nazis. Sir Arnold was also a prolific writer with over 50-titles to his credit between 1912 and 1958. In his capacity as an author and agnostic, he published Roman Converts in 1924, which consisted of highly critical studies of five eminent converts to Roman Catholicism: John Henry Newman, Henry Edward Manning, George Tyrell, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and Ronald Knox. In 1930, Lunn published The Flight from Reason, in which he argued that scientific materialism is finally a philosophy of nihilism: it ends by questioning the very basis of its own existence. If materialism be true, Lunn argued, our thoughts are the mere product of material processes uninfluenced by reason. They are, therefore, determined by irrational processes, and the thoughts which lead to the conclusion that materialism is true have no basis in reason. In the same year as The Flight from Reason appeared (1930), Lunn proposed to Knox an exchange of letters for subsequent publication in which he would advance all the objections he could conceive of to Roman Catholicism and Knox would reply. Knox accepted, and for more than a year the letters went to and fro. In 1932 they appeared as a book under the title Difficulties. This exchange did much to clarify Lunn's mind, but even so, nearly two years were to elapse before he was received into the Catholic Church. In 1932, Lunn accepted a challenge from the noted philosopher C. E. M. Joad to discuss Christianity in a series of letters; they were published the following year as Is Christianity True? Joad, an agnostic, attacked Christianity on a wide variety of fronts, and Lunn, by now a believing Christian, if uncommitted to any particular denomination, responded. Lunn later wrote: "I can imagine no better training for the Church than to spend, as I did, a year arguing the case against Catholicism with a Catholic, and a second year in defending the Catholic position against an agnostic." On July 13, 1933, Monsignor Knox received Lunn into the Catholic Church. Lunn's story of his conversion is related in Now I See, which was published in November of the same year. During the Spanish Civil War, Lunn became a dedicated supporter of the Nationalist side; he wrote many anti-Republican articles for the British press, and was a member of the pro-Franco group Friends of National Spain. Lunn visited the Nationalist lines during the war and interviewed the Spanish General Gonzalo de Aguilera Munro; Lunn praised Aguilera as "not only a soldier but a scholar". In 1937, Lunn published Spanish Rehearsal, a pro-Franco analysis of the Spanish war, and George Orwell reviewed it for Time and Tide together with Storm over Spain by Mairin Mitchell. In commending Mitchell’s well-informed analysis, Orwell savaged Spanish Rehearsal, in particular disputing that the burning of nuns was now commonplace in "red Spain". Lunn was also a supporter of Benito Mussolini, stating in a 1938 speech that Mussolini's Fascism "has no sense of bullying" and that life in Mussolini's Italy was "largely the same" as it was before Mussolini took power. Lunn was opposed to Nazism for "its excesses", but lauded Neville Chamberlain for his signing of the Munich Agreement, saying Chamberlain did "a splendid job". Lunn later became a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr. and a contributor to Buckley's National Review. Lunn's writings for the publication were marked by strong anti-communist sentiments. Arnold's wife, Lady Mabel Lunn, died on March 4, 1959. Two years later, on April 18, 1961, Lunn married Phyllis Holt-Needham. In the early 1930s, Lunn was on the point of advertising for a secretary when his wife told him that she had found the perfect secretary for him, the niece of a friend of hers. Two days later "a rather shy-looking young woman" was ushered into his office for a job interview, Phyllis Holt-Needham. An account of the interview is given in Lunn's book Memory to Memory. At the time Lunn was exchanging controversial letters with J. B. S. Haldane, published later under the title Science and the Supernatural. Phyllis, who was an agnostic and very familiar with modern attacks on Christianity, confidently expected that Haldane would demolish Lunn, and was "both surprised and annoyed" by his inability to do so. Her first reaction was to find fault with Haldane as a controversialist and to be "unduly complimentary" about Lunn's controversial talents. Gradually, however, she began to suspect that it was the weakness of Haldane's case which enabled Lunn to get the better of his "intellectual superior," and this was the first step in her return to the Christian faith. Although Phyllis was only mildly keen on skiing and never an accomplished practitioner, she was assistant editor to Lunn of the British Ski Year Book. Arnold was knighted for "services to British Skiing and Anglo-Swiss relations" in 1952. A double-black diamond trail at Taos Ski Valley, NM is named for Sir Arnold Lunn. He was a long-standing member of the Committee of the International Ski Federation. He passed away on June 2, 1974 in London, England at age 86. He was inducted into the Canadian Ski Hall of Fame as a builder in 1990.