Skiers commonly assume that the only way to ski is with two poles. How could it be otherwise? But men have been on skis for more than 6,000 years, and it’s only in the last 100 years that the use of two poles has become the norm.

For millennia, a single pole was the way that a skier propelled himself across snow in pursuit of game and of enemy warriors. One hand needed to be free to shoot an arrow or a gun. The one-pole tradition was so strong that it carried over into early racing and recreational skiing.

All that changed in the early 20th Century. The arrival of downhill skiing, and of steep uphill climbing before the advent of lifts, brought the need for greater upper body balance and support. The need seems obvious enough, in retrospect. But the use of two poles initially met a wall of resistance, much as the outcast sports of

freestyle and snowboarding did years later.

The main opponent of two-pole skiing was an Austrian ski teacher Mathias Zdarsky.

As the author of the world’s first published book of ski instruction, the Lilienfelder Skilauf Technik in 1896, Zdarsky had enormous influence in the sport.

Like technique innovators who followed him over the next hundred years, Zdarsky never doubted that his was the only way to ski.

“He used a single, diskless pole, and would not hear of two poles at all,” records ski historian John Allen. In Zdarsky’s technique, the single pole was not just a tool of propulsion, it was also a rudder. You could pressure it on the snow behind you to steer the turn, as if you possessed a third leg.

It was the way Zdarsky taught Austrian troops to ski, and an appreciative Emperor Franz Josef even awarded him a medal.

Another officer in the Emperor’s army, however, believed that Zdarsky was wrong.

Colonel Georg Bilgeri thought that the support of a stick to turn was not the best way to get down a mountain. A more fluid, elegant and balanced turn could be made if the skier held a pole in each hand. And so Bilgeri instructed his soldiers to ski with two poles. When Zdarsky heard what Bilgeri was doing, he scornfully remarked that the Austrian army contained a pathetic officer who needed four legs to ski.

Nevertheless, Bilgeri won out. By 1912, most Austrians had switched to his more popular, laterally balanced style of skiing. The two-pole alpine turn came into universal use after World War I when it was adopted by Hannes Schneider, who rose to become the world’s most celebrated ski instructor.

For the next 40 years, wooden, bamboo and steel poles were heavy and

cumbersome to swing and plant in the snow. Not until 1959, when America’s Ed Scott developed the lightweight, tapered aluminum pole, did the arms and hands become the deft, quick-flicking components of the turn that we know today.

John Fry is the author of the award-winning Story of Modern Skiing, a history of the sport after 1945.