UW-Madison alum, Les Poods skier Pat Remington remembers the hot dog movement
MADISON, Wis. — It is said that the outstanding skiers of Europe don’t get that way at highfalutin resorts, but through the grassroots custom of the hausberg—that is, the village mountain in your own backyard, the one you ski every day as you grow up. Young Pat Remington had just such a slope behind his Dartmouth Road home in Shorewood Hills—Bradley Park, which even had a ski jump until the 1980s. (Today, it’s a magnificent sledding hill.) It was also the shortest route to Shorewood Hills Elementary School, just at the base of the hill.
“I remember leaving home just as the school bell was ringing and sliding down the icy hill to make it in time. I usually slid down on my shoes,” remembers Pat. “My mom bought me some fancy dress shoes with heels, but they kept catching on the ice. So I took the heels off. My mom was not happy about that.”
He was hot dogging even then.
Years later, as a UW-Madison sophomore, Pat learned he needed four semesters of French to graduate. “There was no way,” he says. Then he had an idea: to take a year off to learn in France. “My brother Mike’s wife is French, and I lived with her sister outside of Besançon, where I took intensive conversational French,” he says. But he was soon distracted from lessons. “After 10 weeks, I went on a ski trip to the Alps, and decided that I would rather ski than go back to class.”
It was there that he was spotted by a member of a ski team who invited Pat to join. “They had a person who was injured, so I stepped in to take his place” and do shows throughout the Alps and Pyrenees.
As part of the hot dog ski movement of the 1970s, Les Poods were daredevils who reveled in pushing the form past its known limits. “We did jumps, ballet, and moguls [bumps]”—moves that later became incorporated into Olympic events. “I was the least experienced and skilled on the team.”
After the ski season, the team invited Pat to return the following year. “I could have stayed in Chamonix. But I was ready to get back to school, and to Kate! That year was an amazing experience for me, as all the stars aligned and I was in the right place at just the right time. I still ski a lot, and occasionally try to do one of my jumps—often with a bad outcome.”
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