ON PAT RO L
More than 60 years ago, alpine legend Tommy Tomasi started the Thredbo Ski Patrol.
AT94 YEARS YOUNG, Tommy Tomasi still skis – better than he walks, he says. Tommy grew up on skis. During World War II, he joined the partisans who used skis to wage underground war near his home town of Bergamo, in northern Italy. He was captured and spent time in a Nazi concentration camp from where he escaped.
After the war he migrated to Australia and worked on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. “I wanted the job that paid the most money,” he says. “When they asked me if I could drive a bulldozer I said, ‘Of course!’ I never drove one before!”
He stayed with Snowy Hydro for a decade. Over the years, he worked with many European ski enthusiasts and became keen to help found a new ski area in the Thredbo Valley. In the mid-1950s, Tony Sponar, who had been a ski instructor in Austria before migrating to Australia, had a vision to transform Thredbo into a ski hill. Tommy made a vow to his friend: “If you open the ski area,
I will start a ski patrol.”
So in 1958, a year after the first rope tow opened at Thredbo, Tommy set up the Thredbo Ski Patrol, an organisation that still provides emergency care and rescue services to snow users. “I wanted to give back,” he says. “When I was a young ski racer in Italy, I had an accident. I was badly hurt and Italian alpine troops took me off the mountain. I wanted to return what they did.”
Tommy not only founded the Thredbo Ski Patrol, he stayed with them as a volunteer for 60 years, hanging up his jacket at age 91.
During his time on the snowfields, Tommy has seen a shift in the amount of snow cover the region receives. “It really changed in the ’70s and ’80s,” he says. “The snow used to be chest high. It’s very disappointing. It has changed in
Italy too.”