Background
Durrance was born in Tarpon Springs, Florida, and moved with his family at age 13 in 1928 to Munich, Germany, where he learned to ski at nearby Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
Durrance was born in Tarpon Springs, Florida, and moved with his family at age 13 in 1928 to Munich, Germany, where he learned to ski at nearby Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
The only medal event was the combined and Durrance finished tenth. Eleventh in the downhill portion and eighth in the slalom.
The following year, he learned the newly developed parallel turn from Anton Seelos. Durrance was named to the 1940 Olympic team, but those games were cancelled due to World World War World War II In 1941, the Durrances bought and operated the lodge and lifts at fledgling Alta in Utah, near Salt Lake City. They moved to Seattle, where Dick worked for Boeing on in-flight camera recording equipment as a Flight Test Engineer, a job that lasted until 1945.
The Durrances then moved to Colorado to work in Denver for Thor Groswold, then the nation"s premier ski maker, to design and test Groswold skis.
At the same time, Durrance contracted with Denver"s Ernest Constam, inventor of the J-bar and the T-bar ski lifts, to sell his conveyances in the West. Durrance sold his first T-bar to Aspen, a resort just then emerging as the first postwar ski area of note in the Rockies.
In 1947, Durrance was hired to manage the Aspen Skiing Company. The struggling company was turned around by Durrance, who brought the 1950 World Championships to Aspen, the first held outside of Europe.
lieutenant put Aspen on the map and it is now one of the most popular ski resorts in the United States.
He also produced a number of ski films and devoted most of his life to the promotion of skiing. Durrance died of natural causes at age 89 on June 13, 2004, in Carbondale, Colorado, near Aspen. In its 75th anniversary issue in 2011, SKI magazine listed Durrance as the "Skier of the Decade" for the 1930s.