The village sign is almost buried under the two metres of snow that has fallen in the past couple of days, and it's hard to make out the peaks of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in the blizzard. Welcome to Mürren in the Swiss Alps, which this weekend celebrates the start of its 100th winter season with what is almost an embarrassment of snow.
Mürren is throwing a party on Sunday, and boldly claims to be marking not just its own centenary but the start of downhill skiing. The event it is commemorating – the opening of the funicular railway, called the Allmendhubelbahn, which carried early winter-sports enthusiasts to the slopes – is prosaic, but Mürren insists it was the beginning of large-scale skiing. More tourists came, hotels began to stay open in the winter, and gradually skiing took over from bobsleigh and tobogganing as the sport of choice.
Strangely, the two heroes who will be lionised on Sunday are not Swiss but British: Henry Lunn, who encouraged the building of the funicular and almost singlehandedly created the winter sports industry in Mürren, and his son Arnold, who wrote the rules for downhill skiing, staged the first slalom in 1922 and the first world championships in 1931 (both held in Mürren), and in 1936 persuaded the Olympics to accept downhill skiing in the face of vigorous opposition from the Scandinavians, who favoured cross-country skiing and ski-jumping.
"Without the British we would still be a Alpine farming village," says Anna-Marie Goetschi, who is organising the celebrations. It will be an Anglo-Swiss event. Bernard Lunn, grandson of Arnold and son of Peter Lunn, who captained the British Olympic team at the 1936 Winter Olympics, will be there, suitably dressed in Edwardian gear. But the guest of honour will be Britain's most famous skier – Eddie "the Eagle" Edwards, the bespectacled plasterer from Cheltenham who became a global superstar when he finished last in both ski-jumping events at the 1988 Winter Olympics.
Is it not an admission of defeat to invite a failure, albeit a heroic one, to represent British skiing at the celebrations? Alan Ramsay, who runs the Jungfrau hotel and is on Mürren's organising committee, admits they did invite members of the royal family, several more conventionally successful British skiers and even Joanna Lumley, but insists Edwards is the perfect choice.
"Some British racers think 'Why him?'" says Ramsay, "but he is without doubt the most famous British skier in the world. They see him as a failure, but he did amazingly well with the limited financial backing that he had and the training he could do, and he had the guts just to go for it. Have you ever stood on a ski jump – it's incredible."
There is a memorial to Arnold Lunn in a garden next to Mürren's railway station. It is buried in a snow drift but after about half an hour's digging the inscription is unveiled: "It was here in Mürren that Sir Arnold Lunn set the first slalom in 1922 and organised the first world championship in downhill and slalom racing in 1931."
In reality, the first slalom, on a course devised by Lunn, is a more significant claim to fame for the village than its funicular. Davos had a ski lift before 1912 and its skiing club was formed earlier than Mürren's, but Mürren could not afford to wait until the slalom anniversary in 2022. This is as much about 21st-century marketing as 20th-century sporting history. The recession and the strength of the Swiss franc have seen a drop in the number of tourists, especially from the UK, and sleepy, car-free, picture-postcard Mürren wants to fight back against glitzier resorts that have stolen its thunder.
Some of this year's early-season skiers hope the marketing does not succeed – they like the fact it's not Davos. "The good thing about Mürren is there aren't many people," says Nils Braun. "Even in the season and at weekends, the slopes are free."
"It attracts a different crowd," says Roman Spieler. "The people who ski here are older, and it's very quiet."
It was not always so. Between the wars, Mürren was the place to be seen – the Davos or St Moritz of its day. Max Amstutz, in his book The Golden Age of Alpine Skiing, says that in the 1920s Mürren became a magnet for aristocrats, plutocrats and people who "managed to live off their skill at skiing or their luck at poker". "No one was bored here," he writes, "because a new and inspirational game had been discovered: skiing, downhill only; as fast and as often as possible."
The French writer Henri Bordeaux portrayed a world where loucheness met heartiness in his 1926 novella Les Jeux Dangereux, set in Mürren, in which a mischief-making Oxford professor with the unlikely name of Brian Daffodil creates mayhem through his advocacy of sin.
If there is any loucheness today it is buried, like the newly commissioned centenary fountain next to the sports centre, under several tonnes of snow. There is a "disco", tantalisingly called the Bliemli Chäller (Cave of Flowers – a natural home for a latterday Brian Daffodil), but it is closed.
The Brits who pioneered downhill skiing prized style and flamboyance. A photograph in the restaurant at the top of the Allmendhubelbahn shows a group of early skiers. The men wear plus fours, the women elegant hats. The adjoining hill is called the Maulerhubel, named after the fizzy Swiss wine they liked to drink while on the slopes.
This weekend is above all a celebration of that British approach to sport – and life. Scandinavians had skied for millennia, but usually with the express purpose of getting from A to B. It was the British who dreamed up the idea of climbing up mountains and then skiing down again for the sheer hell of it.
Were those British pioneers on their primitive skis bonkers? "They were adventurers, like people now who would go for an adventure holiday in the Sahara," says Bernard Lunn. "It took a serious amount of energy. Wherever there was snow, some form of skis had always been used to get from one place to another, but the idea of going downhill for sport was a peculiarly British invention. You had to have a bit of leisure, a bit of money and be a little bit nuts to think that that was fun."
In 1911 the Kandahar Cup, named after the non-skiing Field Marshal Roberts of Kandahar, was contested for the first time. Ten competitors raced over what Arnold Lunn describes in his history of skiing as a "course for heroes" – three miles across a glacier followed by a 1,500-metre (5,000ft) descent, much of it through woodland. A competitor broke his collarbone but carried on and, as Lunn says, "he did not finish last".
The inaugural Kandahar Cup was held in Crans-Montana (which can thus also challenge Mürren's claim to be the originator of downhill skiing), but the following year it was switched to Mürren, where a similarly demanding race nicknamed "the Inferno" is still staged every January. The Inferno, with a field of 1,500 racing over a 10-mile course that starts 3,000 metres up at the summit of the Schilthorn, is organised by the Kandahar Club, which Arnold Lunn founded in Mürren in 1924 to promote his new sport and train British racers.
Max Amstutz, who will also be attending on Sunday, argues in his book that the British were so wedded to the amateur ideals of the early pioneers that they could never compete once skiing had been professionalised. It is an attractive, if romantic, notion which ignores the more humdrum reality that Britain is a largely flat country with a marked absence of snow. But it may be all we have to cling to this weekend as Mürren celebrates Britain's role in inventing the sport, and Eddie the Eagle reminds us of our less than soaring achievements since. It has been downhill all the way since 1912.
