see also quake rocketjumping, strafe jumping, bunnyhopping, etc. when carmack wanted to fix all those issues in q3arena, the players protested, because the game was dull.
From my memory, they actually discovered that bug during development and decided that it actually improved gameplay, so they made it a feature before it was released.
And sadly, they never got it quite right! none of the subsequent tribes games had the same skiing behaviour. The only reason the competitive community in Tribes 2 has hung on for so long is that a community mod sped the game up to be more like Tribes 1.
Forget about Tribes: Vengeance & Tribes Ascend, neither captured that same feel.
