Racing rascal Toni Matt gets his due on Mass. mountain (The Republican Editorials)

Jed Williamson, a former student of Matt’s, remembers chasing his teacher down the mountain. “That’s how I learned,” he told DeForge. “My God, if you did that you were a skier.”

Matt’s speed and skill is the core of his legacy. But we can’t resist the other things that made him so famous in his day – his rascal nature, his cigar-chomping grit and his playful spirit. Instead of Race Trail, the route at Catamount Mountain is now called “Toni Matt.”

But those familiar with the name know the racing spirit remains. The resort’s relabeled run honors an epic ski racer, Anton “Toni” Matt, whose exploits are remembered not only in New England but out west. In his later career as an instructor, he was known to utter a phrase that would have surely sent a chill into his students: “Just follow me.”

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New plaques at the top and bottom of the Toni Matt trail detail some of the man’s history in the sport. Matt died in 1989 at the age of 69.

About 150 racers had turned up that April day. Most knew the course well, DeForge learned. Matt and his teammate, another Austrian and veteran of Europe’s race courses, just took it as it came. Matt beat the standing course record of 12 minutes, 35 seconds by more than 6 minutes. During and after his racing days, Matt helped develop the American ski industry, with stints at Sun Valley in Idaho and the Whitefish Ski Area in Montana, then back east as the ski school chief at Catamount in Massachusetts, from 1960 to 1974.

When an old ski trail sign came down this month in Egremont, and a new one went up, you might think the place was backing off its embrace of speedsters. In a column Sunday, reporter Jeanette DeForge recapped Matt’s story – emigrating to the U.S. from Austria in his late teens, while already a European junior national champion, and in 1939 making a record-breaking run down Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington. This daredevil’s paradise, home of a race called The Inferno, had a new hero. Matt essentially ran the route in a straight-line tuck, reaching speeds of up to 85 mph. His feat recently earned him a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.