The Revelstoke Ski Club was officially formed in December 1914. Less than two months later, the club organized the town’s first competitive ski events, bringing in Thorlief Iversen, president of the National Ski Association of Canada, as a judge. Iversen was blown away by the large, enthusiastic crowds and the competitors’ daring. He declared to the local newspaper that Revelstoke could “become the hub and centre of winter sports for all of North America.” 

During that first winter carnival, Iversen and another young Norwegian immigrant, Nels Nelsen, identified a natural jumping site on Mount Revelstoke. At the time, ski jumping was widely regarded as a “fad … to be indulged in only by those imbecile immigrants from Norway,” Nelsen later wrote. To change people’s minds, Nelsen knew he would have to accomplish something sensational. A crew of volunteers built the jump — at the time the largest in the world — in the winter of 1915, and in 1916, Nelsen himself became the Canadian ski jumping champion.

For the next 50 years, Revelstoke reigned supreme in the realm of competitive ski jumping, turning out heroes and innovators who made international headlines, including Isabel Coursier, who in 1922 at the age of 15 set the first women’s world record in ski jumping, Nelsen, who broke his own world record four times, and Bob Lymburne, who represented Canada at the 1932 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., and, the following year, set a new world record in Revelstoke with a jump of 287 feet.