Ski instructors and women's hearts - a showdown

Well, I admit: there's something about ski instructors. When they stand in their ski instructor - outfit with bent knees on the skis and casually pull their poles behind them, while they make their perfect Bögerl in front of you. With a toothpaste - Barbie Ken - smile they encourage you, while the ski pants on your butt is already soaking wet from the constant falling over, but still two three times down the slope. I'm not even going to start on the exertions of skiing up a drag lift.

But of course you get up. For the 37th time - you smile away the rising fit of rage in you. And then this outrageously good-looking, tanned god on skis holds a gummy bear under your nose. For motivation.

Gummy bears? Well, now would be the time when the classic sound of a "film break" would be played in a movie.I was 12 years old, on a ski camp in Saalbach-Hinterglemm, and my adored ski instructor, whom I was just as convinced as my 13 group mates that I would marry, was named Franzl.

But whether Franzl, Toni, Sepp or Jean-Pierre - the attraction of ski instructors also works on "real women". And that even into old age.

At least everything used to be easier. At least a handful of Leutasch ski instructors I meet at a regulars' table evening are sure of that. They are in their mid-80s and regularly reminisce. "Can you still remember the group of Dutch girls, the blondes who looked like mannequins?" asks Karl of his counterpart. Hubert nods his head, smiles mischievously and then takes a sip of beer. A big one. Then he shakes his head. Hollawind. That must have been a special memory, I think to myself silently.Little by little, the five of them thaw out. After all, they are gentlemen of the old school and don't like to tell stories and clichés. But they agree: "You notice right away when a woman or ski student is interested in you. Then as now."

Only back then, apparently, everything was simpler."If you met in the evening after the ski instructor day, then there was always someone who virtually felt out whether there `something could go' ", tells Franz while we are waiting anxiously for the story. "And that was often the case," he gives us a little insight and confirms our thesis that ski instructors often don't even have to do much and women's hearts just fly to them.

When I tell Kurt "Truk" Brendle from the Alpin Power ski school in Seefeld about the stories of his older work colleagues, he almost becomes a little envious. "One thing I can tell you is that it hasn't been like it used to be for a long time," he says, as if shot out of a pistol.

But why, I want to know from him?"It used to be really easy to get women as a ski instructor," he enlightens us. "It's changed a lot, though." Of course, pick-up lines and flirting are part of the ski instructor's "job." "It's even kind of expected of our profession." If the ladies respond - and it's at all desired - then bingo. "But many of us are in relationships and happy. And we know what bed we're sleeping in." So is that it? Ski instructors have become faithful?

But back to the merry quintet at the ski instructors' regulars' table. They continue to have a good time when they think back to the old days. "You know," Kurt enlightens me, "young or old, it didn't matter back then. The ladies ranged from the very young to the spry - and they all wanted to give us their hearts."

Sweet, I think to myself. The old school and the "hearts." Exactly. Even back then it was hardly about hearts, let's face it. "Well, we knew how, of course," he grins mischievously at the age of 80. Even then, it was the good sayings of a tanned man who knew how to put himself in the limelight.

Today that is also different, Kurt Brendle knows. "Many young ski instructors simply no longer have the mouth that we have and especially our predecessors had." The sayings are missing and being a ski instructor is limited to learning how to ski.