Technology

By Seth Masia

The wholesale/retail scene was rocked in September when Newell Brands Inc, announced it would sell or fold K2 Sports and its subsidiaries.

Two of the oldest brands in skiing, Völkl and Marker, thus have cloudy futures. Völkl has been in more-or-less continuous production in the Bavarian town of Straubing since 1914; Marker was founded 150 miles south, in Garmisch, and has been in continuous production since 1952.

Major ski, boot and binding companies have been sold in the past, but few in a manner that threatened the future of the brand. In recent times, only Benetton’s failure, in 2003, comes close. Nordica was salvaged from that disaster through its sale to Tecnica, but the Kästle brand was shelved, to be revived four years later by an Austrian industrialist with no ties to the original company.

The sale of K2 Sports follows the April merger of Newell with Jarden, the consumer-products conglomerate that had purchased K2, along with its affiliated brands, in 2007. The merger created a $15 billion company, manufacturing 46 mass-market brands, including Rubbermaid, Papermate, Elmer’s, Coleman, Irwin Tools, Sunbeam and Mr. Coffee.

On October 4, Newell CEO Michael Polk told a group of investors that the company plans to sell the winter sports brands during the first half of 2017. Sales director Pete Iverson confirmed that Newell wants to sell the group as a package, and not as individual companies. In addition to K2, Völkl and Marker, the package would include Line skis, apparel lines Marmot and Zoot, Full Tilt ski boots, snowboard lines Ride, Morrow and 5150, plus snowshoe brands Tubbs and Atlas.

Polk indicated that “underperforming” brands, contributing about 10 percent of Newell’s annual revenue, would be unloaded, including Rubbermaid and Irwin. The tools division has already been sold to Stanley Black & Decker for $1.95 billion. Most of the brands for sale are “durable goods.” What would be left are “consumable” goods like office, restaurant and kitchen supplies – products that customers replenish several times each year.

Polk was widely quoted saying “Some of them are the kinds of businesses that would be difficult to sell and therefore, we should just shut down because they create no value for [investors] and they are a distraction for us.” On its face, this is a rash statement for an executive who hopes to realize any value from the assets, and Polk later said K2 Sports would remain open.

Iverson noted that in October K2 began showing next winter’s samples – including seven new skis and four new boots -- to key retailers and buying groups. Völkl and Marker were evidently on a similar schedule, though in early November other shop owners remained uncertain if all the brands would be deliverable next fall. Nonetheless, Iverson said, interest from potential buyers is keen. The K2 brand names – with or without the actual factories – may wind up in the hands of an outside investment group, or with an investor-backed group of K2 executives, at a bargain basement price. The intellectual property, especially Marker’s portfolio of patents, has value to its competitors.

Potential buyers for the K2 Sports group include its competitors, Amer (the Atomic/Salomon group), Rossignol/Dynastar/Lange, or Tecnica Group (including Nordica and Blizzard). But a senior executive at one of those companies said that, at press time, Newell had no sales presentation, financial data or advance orders available to show to potential buyers. That may mean that a buyer is already lined up.

Of the large manufacturing groups, Tecnica would be the best fit – it has only a single ski brand and is powerful in boots, where K2 is weak. Critically, Tecnica Group has no binding and should therefore be interested in Marker. But Tecnica, like many hardgoods companies, is skating on thin financial ice and would probably need to bring in an investment partner.

K2 was founded in 1962 by Bill and Don Kirschner of Vashon Island, Washington, and rose to world prominence as the ski supplier to Phil and Steve Mahre. After several changes in ownership, in 2001 production moved to Guangzhou Province, China and the Vashon factory closed. Cheaper production and improved margins allowed a new period of expansion, and K2 Sports -- parent company of the K2 brands -- bought Völkl, Marker and Marmot in 2004.

Early boot design was dictated by binding design. The modern era introduced new materials, fit and height that led to a revolution in alpine technique.

BY SETH MASIA

In the beginning, Norwegian farmers and hunters used their daily work shoes when skiing. Until the 1840s, the typical ski binding was a simple leather strap that passed across the front of the boot. The main design concern was to keep the inside of the boot dry, so the socks could do their job of insulating the foot. Water repellency depended on tough top-grain leather liberally slathered with a mixture of wax and animal fat. This combination of a flexible boot, simple binding, and skis without steel edges was useful mainly for running across meadows and gently rolling woodland, and an occasional sporting ski jump. The simple forefoot strap imposed a limit on running performance: If the skier kicked back too briskly, the boot could slip backward out of the strap. Saami skiers—the original Lapplanders—had a solution for this: They built a vertical lip onto the toe of their reindeer-hide boot, to keep it from sliding back through the binding strap (photo left). Sometimes this lip became an exaggerated curled-up toe; Santa’s elves are often depicted wearing Saami boots.

When skiing became a sport, and skiers began to tackle steeper hillsides and real jumps, skiers needed better control of both steering and edging. Bindings grew stiffer, with the invention around 1840 of the heel strap to pull the boot firmly forward into the toe strap. Sondre Norheim and his friends, for instance, devised a heel-strap binding of braided willow. When Fridtjof Nansen equipped his team for the 1888 crossing of Greenland, the Saami-style toe was still in use, but a buckle loop had been added to keep the heel strap in place.

The toe strap then evolved into the rigid steel toe iron, and the heel strap became more robust in order to push the boot firmly into the toe iron. These developments required a boot with a stiffer, heavier sole, usually reinforced with a wooden shank to resist crumpling under the forward pressure of the heel strap. The heavy sole was extended front and back to provide purchase for the toe iron and heel strap. Climbing boots of the era were made on a similar pattern to accommodate crampons, but had steel cleats or calks nailed to the soles for traction, which would have destroyed any wooden ski top in short order.

From village cobbler to mass production

Until the 1870s, all of these boots were handmade by local cobblers. Mass production of military boots, nailed and screwed together mechanically, became common in England during the Napoleonic Wars, and during America’s Civil War, Union troops were equipped with mass-produced boots made to the first-ever standard sizing system. These developments didn’t really affect ski boot design. Because climbers and skiers ordered their boots from someone they knew in the village, nearly all ski boots were, in fact, custom made—the cobbler measured your foot before starting work. 

This changed with the introduction, in the United States, of industrial sewing machines and mass-produced shoes and boots (photo left). The key inventions were the Goodyear welt, developed beginning in 1865 by mechanics working for Charles Goodyear, Jr.; and the automatic lasting machine, patented in 1883 by Jan Matzeliger. The inventions were promptly put to work in New England’s mill towns. By 1876, the G.H. Bass boot factory in Portland, Maine, cranked out a thousand pairs of shoes and work boots every day. European shoe factories sprang up using the new industrial sewing equipment, and by 1885 companies in Switzerland, France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy shipped thousands of shoes and boots daily. Around the turn of the century, the first mass-produced leather ski boots appeared in sporting goods catalogs.

The first alpine boots

For a quarter century thereafter, the typical ski boot was just a lace-up work boot with a roomy box toe (to accommodate those wool socks) and an extended sole to mate with the heel-strap binding of the era. Then, in 1928, the Swiss ski racer Guido Reuge invented a cable binding designed to hold the heel down for alpine skiing. He named the binding after the Kandahar series of alpine ski races. The powerful steel cable and front-throw adjuster cranked hard on the boot sole, which had to be stiffened considerably. At this point, alpine ski boot design diverged from nordic boots. Boots for cross-country racing and ski jumping needed a flexible sole. But because alpine racing didn’t require the boot to flex at the ball of the foot, the sole could be built with a stiff full-length shank. And because alpine skiers wanted the foot held firmly down on the ski, bootmakers created an instep strap (photo right). Coincidentally, 1928 was the year the mountaineer Rudolf Lettner invented the segmented steel edge for alpine skis. Suddenly, skis could be controlled on steep and icy faces—if your boots were stiff enough to drive the edges.

Most skiers used inexpensive mass-produced ski boots, but racers, instructors and wealthier sportsmen ordered their boots custom-made, from ski-town cobblers in the Alps. A few of these craftsmen, like Peter Limmer Sr., set up shop in America. 

After World War II, custom bootmakers developed the double boot, with a soft and comfy lace-up inner boot protected and stiffened by a thick bull-hide outer casing laced with heavy-duty corset hooks (photo left). The complex design was difficult to reproduce with machines, and the European cottage industry adapted to mass production of hand-stitched leather boots. Companies like Henke in Switzerland, Le Trappeur in France and Nordica in Italy employed hundreds of workers to export hand-stitched boots.

With the commercialization of ski boots came the first serious marketing campaigns, and the first athlete endorsements. In 1950, when the Nordica shoe factory in Montebelluna, Italy, sold its first ski boots, the company had the good fortune to equip Zeno Colò, who won two World Championships at Aspen that winter. The publicity put Nordica on the map.

Even with several layers, leather boots were not very waterproof, warm or durable. If you skied more than a few days a year, boots quickly grew soft and sloppy. An aggressive skier needed new boots each winter, an expensive proposition. It was possible to soak leather in glue and make it stiff as a board, but then the boot couldn’t be laced closed, and wouldn’t adapt to the shape of the foot. Even reinforced boots got wet and softened steadily. Like many top racers, Jean-Claude Killy loaned boots to friends for breaking in. When the boots were “seasoned”—comfortable but not yet soft—they were good for a few races. Something better was needed.

Buckles and wedeln

A partial solution to making boots stiffer and more durable arrived in 1954, when Swiss bike racer and stunt pilot Hans Martin patented the ski boot buckle. His original patent specified a quick-adjust “lacing system” with overlapping boot flaps, to allow loosening for climbing and tightening for descents. Martin licensed the patent to Henke, and went to work helping to design their boots (photo left). The buckle was far more powerful than any set of laces and could close a very stiff boot. Quick, short turns became possible, and the tail-wagging wedeln technique became popular in ski schools around the world. To make boots even stiffer, bootmakers added internal plastic heel cups and cuff reinforcements.

Plastics and edging power

Then, during the half-decade from 1966 to 1972, everything changed. By 1962, European bootmakers were experimenting with sheets of plastic laminated to the outer leather for waterproofing and improved durability. At the same time, Bob Lange and Dave Luensmann made the first vacuum-molded plastic boot shell (photo above), and the following year figured out how to mold it from liquid urethane (see “50 Years of Lange” in the March-April 2015 issue of Skiing History).  Nordica’s Aldo Vaccari—a chemical engineer by training—saw the Lange boot and quickly figured out how to replace hand-stitching of the sole with a waterproof polyurethane outsole, permanently bonded to the leather upper, using high-speed injection molding machinery. This was a big improvement, quickly adopted by competing factories (photo left). It superseded eighty years of lasting machinery based on sewing-machine technology.

But the real revolution occurred in 1966, when Lange equipped the Canadian ski team with plastic boots for the Alpine World Championships in Portillo (see “Fifty Years of Lange,” March-April 2015). The boots were a sensation—it quickly became clear that laterally stiff plastic boots dramatically improved edging power on ice, and that they would dominate racing (photo right). At the 1968 Olympics, Jean-Claude Killy won three gold medals in his leather Le Trappeur Elite boots, but eight of the remaining 15 medals were won in Langes. Leather boots soon disappeared from racing. Nordica introduced its first all-plastic boot that year. Neighboring boot factories in Montebelluna rushed to make “plastic” boots with urethane-coated leather. By the following year full-bore injection-molded boots were available from Kastinger and Peter Kennedy, Rosemount was shipping its fiberglass boot, and Mel Dalebout offered a magnesium shell.

Spoilers and avalement

Meanwhile, French racers developed a new technique using knee flex to absorb or “swallow” the cross-under portion of turn initiation. This was dubbed avalement, French for swallowing. The move demanded full use of the ski tail in powering the turn exit, and that required a higher boot back. In 1961, Le Trappeur introduced the Elite, a stiff, forward-canted boot that gave racers a better tool for knee-flexed pressure control, and it was widely imitated (including by Lange). Before the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, “spoilers” appeared on racing boots, including the stovepipe Lange Comp and sleek leather Nordica Sapporo (photo left) and plastic Olympic, designed by Sven Coomer (see

“Master Boot Laster,” May-June 2014). By 1973, driven mainly by Coomer at Nordica, the fully modern ski boot had emerged, with its removable and customizable innerboot, overlap or external-tongue closure, and hinged cuff with a high-back spoiler (photo right). Plastic boots didn’t break in like leather, and required “flow” materials or some form of adaptable or injected foam to conform comfortably to the infinite variety of foot shapes.

There were significant departures from this model: the warm and comfortable rear entry boot, first sold by Freyrie, Montan and Heschung in 1968, had a good run beginning with Hanson in 1971, and accounted for 80 percent of all boots sold by 1987. But racers weren’t impressed, preferring the closer shell-to-foot fit of overlap designs. Most factories kept a few overlap race models in production, and by 1990 most high-performance boots returned to that model. In 1980, half a dozen factories introduced innovative knee-high boots, which proved both comfortable and powerful—but the ski pants of the era didn’t fit over the tops, so ski shops quit selling them after a year. 

There were also some design improvements. A huge step forward came when ski boot sole shapes standardized in the 1970s. It meant that ski bindings finally had a reliably consistent mechanical surface to grasp. Driven by international standard-setting organizations, binding design consolidated around a well-understood set of engineering principles, and the rate of lower-leg injuries dropped by 90 percent.

In the late ‘70s, Mel Dalebout invented the detachable and cantable outsole. Sven Coomer developed the custom-fit “orthotic” insole to improve power, comfort and precision in any boot, and then, in 1983, working for Koflach, he introduced the power strap, which had the effect of a fifth buckle at the top, bringing the effective tongue height to mid-shin (photo left). Henke introduced the three-piece shell (“bathtub” lower shell, external tongue, upper cuff) with the Strato in 1971, and the concept took off with the introduction of Nordica’s Comp 3 (1978) and Raichle's Flexon (1980). That Raichle is still in production under K2’s Full Tilt brand. Over the decades, several attempts were made to popularize soft and comfortable “walking” boots that could slip into a supportive exoskeleton for skiing (Ramer, Bataille, Nava). Denny Hanson finally made it work with the new Apex brand. 

And that’s where we stand. 

As technical editor of SKI Magazine for 20 years, Seth Masia witnessed much of the modern evolution of ski equipment. He wishes to thank Gary Neptune for providing sample boots for photography, from the Neptune Mountaineering collection.

Many racers believe they need downsized, super-stiff, ultra-narrow boots. The most accomplished alpine ski boot designer of the plastic era, Sven Coomer, believes that’s changing. 

By Jackson Hogen
Photos by Sven Coomer

While there have been several seminal figures in the creation of the modern plastic ski boot, including Bob Lange, Hans Heierling, Mel Dalebout and brothers Chris and Denny Hanson, a case could be made that none has left as large a footprint as the puckish Australian, Sven Coomer. Over the course of a career that began when he competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne at the age of 16, the autodidact Coomer studied the foot and its function in a variety of athletic environments. From his first contract with Puma in 1965 to his recent work with Atomic, Coomer has left a trail of innovations, many of which enjoy a considerable market presence today. From his home base in Aspen, Colorado, where he has lived since 1997, the last ten years with wife Mary Dominick, Coomer continues to contribute to various boot development projects. 

Above: The Astral Slalom and Racer (1971) became best-sellers, launching the craft of ski-shop custom fitting.

One of Coomer’s designs, the Nordica Comp-3, was the inspiration for the external tongue originally licensed to Raichle and sold by the Swiss brand as the Flexon series. This three-piece shell design still exists intact in the Full Tilt collection, and its imprint is all over the mainstays in Dalbello’s current line. Coomer’s work in the field of molded athletic orthotics, first marketed under the Superfeet brand, virtually created the custom insole category that he still competes in with his unique Down Unders line. 

The groundbreaking models Coomer helped develop for Nordica in the late 1960s began with the one-piece Olympic, followed by the two-piece Astral Racer and Slalom, also known as the benchmark “banana” boots. The Olympic was the first ski boot with a removable liner, a breakthrough that enabled inner boot customization. Then came the iconic Grand Prix and GT, a suite of successes that put the erstwhile middle-of-the-pack leather boot brand on the path to market dominance in the dawning era of plastics. Modern ski boots don’t just echo these designs; they’re based on them. When Coomer claims, “These boots established the fundamental technology and functional design criteria that remains standard in every ski boot today,” he’s not exaggerating. 

Coomer’s influence isn’t limited to the impact of his legacy. A recent collaboration with Atomic resulted in the patented Hawx series of non-race boots that has become the world’s biggest seller, followed up by a reconceived race boot, the Redster. 

AN OLYMPIC PENTATHLETE LEARNS TO SKI IN SWEDEN

Born in Sydney in 1940 to a Swedish mother and Australian father, Coomer soon became deeply involved in multiple athletic pursuits, including swimming and his particular passion, modern pentathlon. His precocious talents earned him a spot in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, for which he felt well prepared. Disaster struck when Coomer was knocked unconscious and hospitalized after a tree separated him from his mount during the cross-country event. Coomer wasn’t about to miss the next four days of competition, so despite bruises that covered half his body, he slipped out of the hospital before dawn and limped back to team headquarters. He ended up 32nd out of 40 entries, a remarkable achievement considering his condition. 

The International Pentathlon Union Secretary General Willi Grut, the 1948 Olympic gold medalist in modern pentathlon, tried to convince Coomer to compete for Sweden, the world leaders in the sport. After finishing high school, Coomer worked his way to Sweden on a merchant ship so he could continue his specialized training while studying mechanical engineering at Stockholm’s Tekniska Institut with an eye towards a career in product design. Impressive competition results had Coomer on track to compete for his native country for the 1960 Rome Games when Australian authorities informed him that he would have to return home to train. Since competing for Sweden was no longer a viable option and as there wasn’t time to find work on a merchant ship for the six- to eight-week trip back to Australia, Coomer was out of luck. “So I gave up on that idea, for the time being,” says Coomer with just a trace of resignation. 

To help take his protégé’s mind off his disappointment, Grut suggested Coomer come up to his cabin in Åre over spring break and learn to alpine ski. “I was instantly smitten with skiing, the new challenge and the possibility of competing in winter pentathlon (giant slalom, cross country, shooting, fencing and riding). When I returned to Stockholm I was determined to finish school, catch a merchant ship back to Sydney, get a job in a ski area and train to be a serious skier.” 

While he never competed in winter pentathlon, Coomer did become proficient enough to train at the national ski team level, which he did with both French and Swiss team members. He counted among his friends Jean-Claude Killy, François Bonlieu, Emile Allais and Leo Lacroix. He frequently cut first tracks with Junior Bounous in Utah and coached the McKinney kids when he ran the ski school at Mt. Rose, Nevada. 

Back in Stockholm, Coomer submitted his ideas on improved track and field shoe design to an influential sports shop that put him in touch with Puma. At the conclusion of a 1965 ski expedition across the Alps from Innsbruck to Grenoble, Coomer was invited to Puma’s factory for a five-day meeting about applying emerging technologies of performance footwear to artificial track surfaces. Coomer’s interest in product development had borne its first fruits.

Each of the next four winters were spent running ski schools, beginning with the PSIA experimental ski school in Solitude, Utah. This position was followed by three years at Mt. Rose and contiguous Slide Mountain near Lake Tahoe. The seasons culminated each spring in a six-week ski test with SKIING magazine editor Doug Pfeiffer at Mammoth Mountain. “It was the first magazine ski testing program,” Coomer recalls. “We’d spend April and May testing and go retreat to New York to write about the skis and ski technique.” 

LEAP FROM LEATHER TO PLASTIC

In turn, the Nordica Comp-3 led to the Raichle Flexon, a favorite of downhillers, mogul and extreme skiers. This photo shows how the boot’s parts evolved.

In 1968, Norm MacCleod from Beconta, distributor of both Puma and Nordica, came to observe the ski tests. MacCleod was sufficiently impressed with Coomer’s ideas about boot and ski design that he invited Coomer down to San Francisco for an interview, which led to Coomer’s signing on with Nordica the following year. Initially MacCleod would carry or mail Coomer’s detailed designs to Italy until Nordica, eager to move ahead quickly, proposed he move there and oversee developments directly in the factory, instead of by correspondence.

When Coomer began with Nordica, the transition from leather to plastic boots was stalled in its infancy. Many racers preferred the close fit of leather, as the first plastic boots were often shapeless inside. Nordica’s initial effort at a plastic shell Coomer describes as “miserably unwearable, really awful.” The first task was to make the best possible leather boot based on all the custom models he designed from each U.S. Ski Team member’s input and then consolidating all the versions into one model, the Sapporo. The Sapporo—worn by Paquito Ochoa when he won slalom gold at the Games for which the boot was named—would serve as the foundation for the first plastic boot that would be anatomically accurate and would take full advantage of all the new materials had to offer, delivering both comfort and performance without compromising either. 

While assembling a wish list for the ideal plastic boot, Coomer delineated, “173 criteria and details that had to be attended to for every model in every size, so it would function correctly,” he recalls. “The key was how to stabilize the foot and lower leg, fore and aft, for a balanced stance and flex. Until that time boots were very low, just over the ankle high, and scary as hell going fast. As we built up the boots, front and back, we called the extensions ‘spoilers’ because they were so effective at helping retain balance, stability and leverage that they spoiled you.”

In 1973, during his tenure at Nordica, Coomer attended an Athlete’s Overuse Syndrome seminar in San Francisco. There he met Dr. Chris Smith, a lecturer in biomechanics at the California College of Podiatry, and Dennis Brown, owner of Northwest Podiatric Labs. Together they would forge Superfeet, presenting their proprietary ideas to leading ski dealers in 1976. Their custom-molded insoles, vacuum-cast in plaster, found a fast following; however, the 3/4-length orthotics were made of hard plastic or fiberglass and took weeks to get back from the lab. Coomer continued tinkering, looking for a better solution that could be molded in situ using a similar process as the vacuum plaster casting. At a trade show in 1979, Coomer found the plaster substitute he’d been searching for the: Birkenstock cork in sheet form. The on-the-spot cork Skithotic was born. 

Meanwhile, by the late 1970s Coomer’s R&D position at Nordica had become untenable after Mariano Sartor was brought in from Caber to run the rapidly expanding design department. Sartor was a skilled draftsman but not a skier, and he succumbed to the pressures of a marketing department who declared four-buckle boots passé and one- and two-buckle boots the future. “It began the Dark Ages of boot design,” Coomer laments, “and it lasted until the mid-1990s.” Nordica ditched the functional design principles that had guided Coomer’s work. His final project, in 1976, the three-piece Comp-3, was the first plastic boot to feature a supportive, lace-up inner boot. 

Coomer quit Nordica to further advance the three-piece shell concept, molding samples with the intent of interesting a boot manufacturer in licensing the innovative boot design. The partner he recruited to sell the concept eventually shut Coomer out of the deal “when he realized he had all he needed and it ended up licensed to Raichle. So 1978 became the year to move on.”

FOCUSING ON R&D AT FOOTLOOSE

The Koflach Super Comp (1983) introduced the power strap. The DH version, left, used a leather cuff because downhill racers of the period found it gave smoother ankle articulation in absorbing bumps at high speed.

He relocated his family (first wife Kathleen, daughter Robin, now 38, and son Seth, 36) from San Francisco to Mammoth to concentrate on perfecting Superfeet orthotics and shell modification technology. His tiny on-slope testing and R&D facility was “an instant success” leading to the creation of Footloose Sports, a specialty ski shop that continues to be rated among the best in the country. Coomer’s partner, Tony Colasardo, still a hands-on co-owner, concentrated on the retail operation, allowing Coomer to continue to work in the R&D arena. Coomer sold his interest in Footloose to Corty Lawrence, Andrea Mead’s son, in 1995.

Following a successful product overhaul at Koflach, Coomer found an outlet for his Mammoth research into custom-fit concepts in his next consulting relationship, with San Marco and Munari, brands made at the Brixia factory in Montebelluna, Italy. 

It was while working with Munari on a new rear-entry model and subsequently on an overlap boot design that used all 173 of Coomer’s design criteria, that he began perfecting and producing his patented silicone-injection liners with Brixia’s encouragement. When the Silicone Personalization System (SPS) was introduced to Swiss dealers by their local Head distributor, the rebound in San Marco sales was so sensational that Head bought the brand new Brixia boot factory and marketed SPS internationally under the Head brand. 

Coomer continued to produce his silicone liners under his own ZIPFIT brand (for Zero Injection Pressure Fitting), while pursuing a new objective: eliminating all mixing and injecting of volatile chemicals. The latest result of his pursuit of perfection is “a pre-packed dynamic-response fit system that fits by actively molding a granular cork and proprietary clay-like composite according to the skier’s personal dynamic anatomy. The formula cannot catalyze, harden, pack-out or droop, and can be effectively refitted perfectly every day, rather than the familiar progressive deterioration, and it’s durable enough to last a thousand days, or longer than your shells.” 

To assist the daily fitting process, Coomer created the Hot Gear Bag, a clever accessory that heats boots and other ski paraphernalia. The bag warms both shells and liners to an optimum temperature so the skier can slip easily into any boot. It’s been an essential accessory among the World Cup racers for a decade. 

While there isn’t an overlap or three-piece shell made today that doesn’t owe some debt to Coomer’s trailblazing designs, the current Atomic collection has his fingerprints all over it. The Hawx series evolved from concepts developed in partnership with Hans-Martin Heierling and drafted by the Claudio Franco design studio in Montebelluna. The Redster race boot concentrates on stabilizing the rear foot with an ultra-solid spoiler so the skier’s forefoot is allowed to flex and move naturally within the confines of the shell. This liberation of the previously stunted, frozen and crushed forefoot is what allows for the subtle edging and foot steering that initiates the slalom turns of World Cup champions Marcel Hirscher and Mikaela Shiffrin. Coomer suspects that if racers would only fit their boots more accurately, coupled with a dynamic molding inner boot medium between the foot and shell, and without down-sizing into short, narrow, thick-sidewall shells, their results just might improve. 

But then, Coomer, the Cassandra of the ski boot world for the last forty-five years, knows all too well that just because you can prove you’re right, doesn’t mean your advice will be heeded.  

Jackson Hogen is the editor of realskiers.com and co-author of Snowbird Secrets: A Guide to Big Mountain Skiing. His career includes stints as a ski designer, binding and boot product manager, freestyle competitor, ski instructor, marketing director, ski tester for 25 years and boot tester for 20. As a freelancer writer over the past four decades, he has regularly contributed articles to magazines including SKI, Daily Mail Ski, Snow Country and Skiing History.

Are today’s boots really any better? In a November 2014 editorial on RealSkiers.com, author Jackson Hogen observes that alpine ski boots haven’t evolved much in the past 25 years. To read the article, click here.

By Seth Masia

At the 19th convention of the International Society for Skiing Safety, held at Keystone in May, 2011, researcher Jasper Shealy, Ph.D., professor emeritus of engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology, reported that from 1995 until 2010, helmet use increased from 5% to 76%. Over that period, the rate of serious head injuries dropped by about 65% —from 1 injury in 8,775 skier days to 1 injury in 25,690 skier days.

In 2009, the two largest ski resort companies in North America—Vail Resorts and Intrawest—extended their mandatory helmet rules to cover not just kids in ski school and terrain parks, but all employees working on the snow. At the same time, state legislatures in New Jersey and California passed laws to require kids under 18 to wear helmets (though Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a companion bill that would have required California resorts to enforce the rule). Partly as a result of these measures, retail sales now total about 1.5 million ski helmets each winter. 90 percent of kids under 10 wear them. Snowsports Industries America (SIA) reports that the helmet market is growing at about 5% annually.

How did we get here? As recently as 1990, the ski helmet barely existed as a consumer product—this despite wide acceptance of helmet use by cyclists, kayakers and rock climbers. In snowsports, only downhill racers were required to use helmets, and slalom racers used them mostly to protect the goggles from impact with breakaway gates.

The modern ski helmet derives directly from earlier helmets developed for motorsports and cycling. From the earliest days of bicycle racing, heat stress was a more immediate concern than blunt trauma injury, and racers weren’t about to use any headgear that blocked cooling air from the scalp. By 1900 the racing “helmet” of choice was a “hairnet” of lightly padded leather straps. As skull protection it was a joke. One cyclist said his hairnet would keep the ears from being ground off when sliding on the pavement. By 1910, most ice hockey and football players wore boiled-leather helmets with felt or shearling liners, and motorcycle racers had begun wearing football helmets.

Helmet design, such as it was, was pure guesswork. The first scientific examination of head injuries and helmets was begun in 1935 by Sir Hugh Cairns, an Australian-born, Cambridge-trained physician who had studied neurosurgery at Harvard. He was one of the attending physicians when T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) died of brain injuries suffered in a motorcycle crash that year. Cairns conducted a series of impact tests using cadaver heads, and determined that the best protection for the brain is achieved with a liner that could deform to reduce the deceleration of the skull, along with a frangible hard shell (the shellacked linen shell, for instance) that would itself absorb energy by fracturing.

Helmets Hit the Slopes

Until the development of modern alpine racing, skiers had no need for helmets. Downhill speeds were slow, and the snow was soft. But with the development of steel edges and the Kandahar binding, racers began to achieve speeds over 30 mph, on purposely-iced courses. In January 1938, alpine racing suffered its first fatality when Giacinto Sertorelli—the seventh-place finisher at the 1936 Garmisch Olympic downhill—went off the same course and into a tree. A few ski racers adopted the cycling hairnet, worn over a woolen Seelos cap (a light toque, like a sailor’s watch cap). See photo above of Jean Vuarnet wearing a ski-specific leather helmet during his gold-medal run at Squaw Valley in 1960. This helmet went into production before 1934.

Real progress in crash-protective helmets came after World War II, with the development of fiberglass-reinforced epoxy resins and crushable plastic foams. Fiberglass was just the right stuff to meet the Hugh Cairns prescription for a tough but frangible shock-absorbing shell. Among the first to adopt the fiberglass crash helmet were American and British pilots testing the first generation of jet fighters. In 1947, Charles Lombard of Northrop Aviation, along with Herman Roth and Smith Ames at the University of Southern California, patented a fiberglass helmet containing an inch-thick crushable liner of cellulose acetate foam. This was the U.S. Air Force P1 helmet, which was actually produced using polyurethane foam, custom-poured into the helmet for each pilot using a process similar to that adopted later by Peter Kennedy for his early plastic ski boot. In England, Cromwell, Stadium, Kangol and Everoak began selling fiberglass-shell motorsports helmets. In 1953, AGV in Italy, a manufacturer of leather bike saddles and motorcycle helmets, produced a fiberglass helmet, and the following year adapted it for use by speed skiers competing in Cervinia’s Kilometro Lanciata – the first recorded use of a hardshell ski helmet. On the race circuit, more downhillers began adopting leather bicycle-style helmets, from manufacturers like SIC in France.

In 1954 Herman Roth found that expanded polystyrene bead foam (EPSB or EPS), brand-named Styrofoam, made a cheaper, lighter, equally shock-absorbent liner. With Lombard, he launched a company called Toptex to market the fiberglass/EPS helmet for motor sports, and the first customer was the motorcycle corps of the Los Angeles Police Department. At the same time, in nearby Bell, Calif., Roy Richter, owner of Bell Auto Parts, began making fiberglass helmets for race-car drivers patterned after the polyurethane-cushioned Air Force design. The Bell 500 was state of the art for motorsports. But in 1957 it failed the first round of testing by the new Snell Memorial Foundation. The only helmet to pass the new impact test was the Toptex, with its EPS liner. The difference: unlike resilient rubber and polyurethane foams, the EPS material crushed and stayed crushed. It didn’t rebound to slosh the brain around inside the skull. Bell licensed the Toptex technology and the stage was set: in future, all crash-protection helmets would be based on EPS crushable foam, with or without a protective shell.

At Winter Park, Steve Bradley had a crew of hardy youngsters piloting his new Bradley Packer-Grader grooming machines. Jim Lillstrom, one of the pilots, recalls that in 1955 Bradley furnished the new Bell Toptex helmets to the grooming crew, and he believes they were the first skiers so equipped.

The U.S. Ski Team took note. In 1958, the U.S. team took Bell Toptex helmets to Europe. Europeans laughed at the hard hats. But while practicing for the Hahnenkamm, Tommy Corcoran had a bad fall just above the Ziel Schuss, going over backward on the ice. He hit his head so hard that he barely remembers the accident today. The impact broke the shell of the Bell helmet, but Tommy escaped serious injury, got up and skied the next day. The team began to regard the helmets with some respect.

The following year, Canadian downhiller John Semmelink was killed at Garmisch, hitting his head on a rock while wearing a leather helmet. And so, for the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley in California, hard-shell helmets were decreed mandatory for the downhill. No specific standards were imposed—national teams were free to set their own requirements, and usually chose their own domestic production. And so the Europeans turned up with a variety of dome-shaped “pudding pots” with leather earflaps, made by AGV, Carrera, Cromwell and others. 

Penny Pitou, silver medalist in downhill and GS at Squaw, remembers that Bell helmet. “It was huge, a bit like a diver's helmet,” she said. “And the wind whistled through it when I went fast, so I thought I was breaking the sound barrier. And it was heavy, too. I hated wearing it, but rules are rules. At least it didn't push my goggles down over my nose. I retired that big blue helmet to the garage. Eventually the mice made a nest in it and I could, in good conscience, toss it out.”

Hard-shell helmets arrived just as downhillers transitioned to metal skis, skin-tight suits and the streamlined “egg” position. Speeds rose quickly, and catastrophic injuries, too. Stefan Kaelin, a star of the Swiss team during that era, remembers using a cork helmet with a fabric cover, made by Vuarnet, in 1962. Then Australian skier Ross Milne died in training for the 1964 Innsbruck Olympic downhill. The following July, racing in New Zealand, the Swiss had fiberglass helmets.

Ski racers complained about the weight, and about interference with goggles. “When in a tuck for a long time it was hard to keep your head up, and you didn’t see as well,” remembers Canadian downhiller Scott Henderson. “Some goggles, like the old Boutons, worked. The newer double-lens goggles didn’t.”

Manufacturers responded by departing from standard motorcycle-helmet design. In 1973, the Snell Memorial Foundation published a ski helmet standard calling for something like a lighter motorcycle design. Bell then adapted a motocross helmet with a lighter fiberglass shell to produce the SR-1 (for ski racing). The original motocross helmet had a jaw protector meant to ward off clods of dirt thrown up by spinning tires, and a larger face cutout to accommodate big goggles. The SR-1 offered the same features, certified to a lower impact standard. At least two skiers weren’t impressed. Steve and Phil Mahre ran downhill in their Bell 500 motorcycle helmets. “The ski helmets were a joke for impact protection,” Phil said.

Another solution to the weight problem was acrynitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). Butadiene is a synthetic rubber. It made the tough plastic resilient enough for use in auto bumpers. An ABS shell could be designed to split or crush to absorb impact, rather like a glass shell. Most important, it could be injection-molded, making it much cheaper than fiberglass, which had to be laid up by hand on a steel form. ABS helmets, lined with EPS, were cheap enough to market to the public. By 1973, European companies like Jofa, Boeri, Uvex and Carrera were marketing inexpensive plastic helmets, especially for kids.

Beginning around 1974, regional cycling associations began looking for improved bicycle helmets. A number of good helmets were produced based on climbing-helmet designs, but they provided inadequate cooling, or were deemed too heavy. Eventually the bicycle business settled on a simple EPS helmet with a light fabric cover, or only a very thin decorative polycarbonate shell. Giro was founded in 1987 based on this design, just as the U.S. Cycling Federation began requiring certified helmets in all competitions. By 2003, when the Union Cycliste Internationale followed suit, dozens of factories filled the need for lightweight bike helmets. Most of them immediately adapted their cycling helmets for the ski market. By 2010, Snowsports Industries America listed 31 different brands of ski and snowboard helmets, all of them based on EPS liners and most certified to the European EN1077 or EN812 standard. Some meet the more stringent ASTM 2040 standard and a very few meet Snell’s RS98 standard, which tests at more than 30 percent higher impact for the anvil tests simulating tree or rock collisions.

It’s unfortunate that wide acceptance of helmet use has had to ride on tragedy. Off the race course, helmet sales were spurred by the tree-collision deaths of Michael Kennedy and Sonny Bono, six days apart at the turn of 1998. Helmet use by highly visible athletes in half-pipe and terrain-park competition has also helped bring helmets into mainstream use.

Serious head injuries have always been rare. Minor injuries are even more rare: there’s no question that helmets prevent superficial but bloody scalp lacerations, and also the head-bumps consequent to the dropping of the ski-lift safety bar.

Besides, if we didn’t have helmets, we wouldn’t have helmet covers, and the ski school lift lines wouldn’t now be filled with small colorful unicorns, pussycats, tigers and zebras.

The trouthead helmet

In the summer of 1963, Sun Valley racers Dick Dorworth and Ron Funk went to Portillo with the goal of breaking the world speed record on skis, then owned by Alfred Plangger at 101 mph, set at Cervinia. Injured, Funk withdrew from the running, but Dorworth and Portillo patroller C.B. Vaughan pushed the record up to 107 mph. Dorworth learned that putting his head down to stare at the snow turned the smooth top of his Bell helmet into a nose cone, improving speed a few percentage points. And so the record was broken by a skier who didn't always look where he was going. Around 1972, the Austrian downhiller Erwin Stricker created a streamlined helmet that allowed racers to sneak a look ahead without disrupting the airstream. In 1977, the new record-holder Steve McKinney, with Tom Simons, redesigned it with extensions to smooth airflow over the shoulders and even provided a small fairing under the chin where a skier could tuck his hands. McKinney and Simons didn’t have a wind tunnel for testing, but patterned the shape after the slick front end of a trout. The trouthead helmet helped McKinney break the 200-kph barrier the following year. In 1982, Franz Weber brought in some pros: Richard Tracy of Learjet and ultralight aircraft designer Paul Hamilton created an even slicker helmet shape. Carrera produced about 500 units. Every speed record-setter since then has used a helmet patterned after the trout-head design.

Slalom helmets

With the introduction of the Rapidgate slalom pole in 1980, ski racing changed forever, and slalom racers began to dress like hockey players. The padded sweater gave way to the plastic vambrace and greave for forearm and shin. Ski pole grips grew saber bells. The first generation of slalom helmets weren’t even designed to protect the cranium, but just the jaw and the goggles. One form was a kind of minimalist catcher’s mask, protecting just the face and forehead. Another, from the fashion house Conte of Florence, was a rubber cap with a peak extending far enough forward to bounce the plastic gate away from the goggles. Today, slalom racers use a simple jaw-bar attached to a standard ABS-shell skier’s helmet.

By John Fry

The recent horrifying injury suffered by Formula One racing champion Michael Schumacher -- not in a speeding race car, but when he was skiing between pistes on ungroomed snow in the French Alps -- is a reminder of the not-always fruitful attempts over the years to create equipment aimed at making skiing safer.

          Schumacher was wearing a helmet when his head hit a rock. Without it, he would likely have been killed instantly. On the other hand his helmet failed to prevent severe skull damage, and would not have prevented rotational neck or spinal injury.

          Notwithstanding the optimism aroused when ski helmet-wearing was adopted by millions of recreational skiers, the incidence of catastrophic head and upper spinal injuries in skiing hasn’t declined. To the contrary, a study last year by the University of Washington has found that the number of snow-sports-related head injuries among youths and adolescents increased 250 percent from 1996 to 2010.

          Perhaps, we shouldn’t be surprised.

          In the 1960s, when football introduced an improved helmet/mask, while it did lessen skull injury, it encouraged players to become more aggressive, and to use their heads as a primary contact point in blocking and tackling. The number of catastrophic neck injuries in football increased.

          Ski helmet use has tripled in the last ten years. It has also coincided with rise of high-risk skiing – cliff-jumping, aerial stunts – celebrated in ski films and in the pages of ski and snowboard magazines, and imitated by young males lacking skill and experience. Wearing a ski helmet made such extreme skiing seem safer, just as better helmets encouraged more aggressive head use in football.

          Over the years, one technological improvement in ski equipment has occasionally canceled out the safety of another.

          Between 1970 and 1985, tibia fractures among skiers fell by 86 percent as a result of the improvement in release bindings. But when boots became higher and more rigid, the injury merely moved up the leg, with a dramatic increase in ACL tears and knee injury.

          Then came a higher binding platform, raising the skier’s boot higher off the snow to increase edging power. That was good. But the power could work in reverse. The feedback from the snow, coupled with the more exaggerated sidecut of the shaped ski, increased the chance of knee injury. The late Toni Sailer, 1956 Olympic triple gold medalist and the chairman of the FIS Alpine Committee, once warned that modern boot and ski design was destroying the knees of a whole generation of young racers.

          “The equipment we have now allows us to do things we really couldn’t do before,” extreme skiing pro Chris Davenport recently told the New York Times. “People’s pushing limits has surpassed people’s ability to control themselves.”

          “There’s this energy drink culture now, a high-level, high-risk culture, that’s being marketed and is impacting the way people ski,” Robb Gaffney, a sports psychiatrist, told reporter Kelley McMillan. “That’s what people see, and that’s what people think skiing is.”

          It is a culture much embraced by the ski industry, and propagated in magazines and dozens of new ski flicks each year.  A new film, The Crash Reel, which ISHA will honor at its annual awards ceremony in Park City, April 3rd, opposes the premise of the typical ski flick. It suggests that the industry should re-evaluate its present manner of imaging snow sports as stunt-filled and  suffused with risk-taking. It’s hard to disagree. 

Also see: Ski Helmets: How We Got Here

Beginning in 1891, skimakers in Norway sought to replace heavy hickory with lighter woods, originally to create faster cross-country racing skis. Over 45 years, laminated skis evolved into the multi-layered high-performance Splitkein and A&T products of the mid-30s.

See the full story here.

GIANT SLALOM RACING SKI DESIGN CONTROVERSY

Despite protests by many racers, the International Ski Federation (FIS) is on track to require longer, straighter giant slalom skis in World Cup and Olympic competition beginning in the 2011-12 season. 

In March 2011, FIS announced that, based on a five-year study undertaken through the University of Salzburg, it had identified several areas for racing safety improvement and would require changes in course setting (to reduce racing speeds), snow conditions, and equipment design.

In regard to equipment, the FIS study measured pressure applied by experienced male racers to various GS race skis, and found that athletes applied less pressure to prototypes of longer, straighter skis than to current designs. Accordingly, FIS called for changing the minimum sidecut radius of a giant slalom ski from 27 meters to 40 meters, beginning with the 2012-13 World Cup and Europa Cup season (other FIS series will have to comply beginning with the 2013-14 season).

A storm of protest followed. Dozens of racers objected. GS World Champion Ted Ligety was the most outspoken of them. Writing in Ski Racing and on his own website, TedLigety.com, he forecast more injuries, not fewer. For one thing, Ligety argues, younger racers have spent their entire careers training on 21- and 27-meter GS skis and may not fare well reverting to a step-and-slide-to-an-edgeset method of turn initiation. The longer, straighter skis may work to the advantage of taller, stronger skiers over lighter, more agile competitors. This point also implicitly raises the issue that none of theSalzburg testers were women. In July, a letter to FIS from ski manufacturers raised technical objections, including the reality that they would need more time to design and test new skis. It was signed by executives at Amer Sports (Atomic and Salomon), Fischer, Head, Nordica, Rossignol and Stoeckli.

On August 24, 2011 FIS announced that after consultation with the Ski Racing Suppliers Association, it had revised the mandate to 35 meters for men and 30 meters for women. At the same time, maximum stand height (the distance between the ski base and boot sole) will shrink from 50mm to 45mm. The goal of the equipment changes is apparently to force a return to an earlier style of skiing, in which the turn begins with a step instead of a nearly instantaneous edge change, and the carving/accelerating portion of the turn is thus reduced.

You have to go back to the 1980s, the era of Pirmin Zurbriggen, to find race GS skis with more than a 35-meter radius. By 1990, course-setters were placing GS gates further across the fall line, and the engineers making limited-production skis for the national teams reacted by making the skis turnier – usually by reducing waist width from about 68mm to around 62mm. The 1991 K2 GS Race got into production with a 62mm waist and a sidecut radius under 32 meters, even at the 210cm length. Race-room skis from all the major factories used similar geometries, two years before Elan revolutionized the recreational sport with the SCX series of shaped skis. I have a pair of GS skis from Blizzard, circa 1991, with a 61mm waist.
 

In the mid-90s, with the introduction of true shaped skis, both length and sidecut radius plummeted. GS skis as short as 175cm arrived with 15-meter sidecuts.

Then FIS stepped in. For the 2003-04, minimum sidecut radius was set at 21 meters, with a 185cm minimum length for men and 180cm minimum length for women. Stand height, which affected both the leverage a skier could apply to edging and the angle at which the boot would ground on the snow, was limited to 55mm. Four years later, radius increased to 27 meters for men and 23 meters for women, stand height came down to 50mm, and the minimum waist width increased from 60mm to 65mm. The width change made a dramatic difference in the way the ski behaved on hard snow: it centralized pressure under the boot at high edging angles.

Rupert Huber, vice president for product development for Amer Sports (Atomic and Salomon), says his athletes have tested 35-meter prototypes and are satisfied they can compete successfully on them. Since 2004, Amer has been a major sponsor of the Christian Doppler Laboratory at the University of Salzburg’s Institute of Sports Science, and has used the laboratory’s findings in its own product development programs. President of Amer’s wintersports division is Dr Michael Schineis, who also serves as president of the Ski Racing Suppliers Association.

Boot and binding designer David Dodge sent FIS a letter citing previously published skiing safety research and suggesting that theSalzburgstudies were flawed. Specifically, he noted that a trained athlete will always put 100 percent effort onto a familiar piece of equipment, and be tentative on something novel – like a longer, straighter prototype. Once athletes become used to the new geometry, they will go 100 percent again. Moreover, they will angulate further to achieve today’s turning radii, leading to a rise in unstable-knee injuries.

It’s unclear why FIS singled out GS skis for attention. Over the first three years of the Salzburg study, FIS alpine racers suffered 59 severe knee injuries, defined as time loss more than four weeks. The Oslo Sports Trauma Research Centerstudied video of 20 of those injuries. Ten occurred in downhill, one in Super G, seven in GS and two in slalom. Ligety claims that over the past two seasons, only three top-30 GS stars have been hurt, and none of those crashes was caused by the skis. He also points out that both slalom specialists and downhill specialists also run GS, so that more runs happen in GS than in any other discipline. That means the frequency of injuries in GS is much lower than in downhill.

Presumably, assuming the manufacturers will allow it, FIS will eventually address the issue of binding release, or design. Then we may see some progress beyond today’s lowest-common-denominator DIN standard.

Photo: Tom Kelly/US Ski Team

Painting: Håkon Håkonsson, the two-year-old future king of Norway, being taken from Lillehammer to Østerdalen in 1206. Ultimate safety for the prince lay further on, in Nidaros (now Trondheim). The intrepid Birkebeiner skiers are Torstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukka. Painted in 1869 by Knud Larsen Bergslien (1827-1908). Thanks to Mike Brady for the history.

Prehistory: Skis preserved in bogs show that hunters and travellers used skis at least 9,000 years ago. As glaciers retreated after the last ice age, stone age hunters followed reindeer and elk herds, using skis covered with fur that worked like modern climbing skins. Skis came to be used across the Eurasian arctic and mountain regions. See European Origin of Skiing

Early modern period: Skis were in regular use by Scandinavian farmers, hunters and warriors throughout the Middle Ages. By the 18th century, units of the Swedish Army trained and competed on skis.

Before 1840: The cambered ski was developed by woodcarvers in the province of Telemark, Norway. The bow-shape cambered ski arches up toward the center to distribute the weight of the skier more evenly across the length of the ski. Before this, skis had to be thick to glide without bowing downward and sinking in the snow under the skier’s weight, concentrated in the middle. If a ski is allowed to bow downward this way, the skier finds himself constantly skiing uphill, out of a hole his own weight has made in the snow. Camber made possible a thinner, lighter ski that did not sink at the middle. The thin, cambered ski floated more easily over soft snow, flexed more easily to absorb the shock of bumps, maneuvered more easily because it was lighter and easier to swing into a turn. The thinner, lighter ski ran faster and maneuvered with better agility than the clumsier sideways skid of the plank-thick older “transportation” skis. In a parallel development, skimakers learned that sidecut enabled more agile turning.

1868: Sondre Norheim demonstrated the Telemark ski,  with a sidecut that narrowed the ski underfoot while the tip and tail remained wider. In the same way as the camber, the sidecut produced a ski that flexed more easily when tipped on edge, so that in a turn its edge followed the shape of the turn instead of skidding sideways. He also popularized a stiffer binding that held the heel centered over the ski when turning. Norheim and his friends formed a small pioneer group of early skiers who improved the ski as they developed the first dynamic turns in downhill running, from 1850 to 1900.

1882: Most high-quality European skis were made of strong, springy ash. In 1882, the first hickory skis produced in Norway. Hickory is so hard and tough that it was difficult to work with traditional hand tools. But with modern carbon-steel tools, Norwegian ski makers began turning out hickory skis. The tough wood made it possible to build a thinner, more flexible ski with good strength, and the hard base was less likely to gouge and scar enough to slow the ski down or cause it to sideslip during a downhill run. Hickory was imported at great expense from Louisiana, and Norwegian immigrants in Wisconsin and Minnesota very quickly figured out that, with easier access to lumber stocks, they could make excellent quality hickory skis more cheaply than their friends back in the old country could. By 1887 several Norwegian skimakers, like the Hemmestveit brothers, had relocated to the U.S. 

1893: The first two-layer laminated ski was built by H.M. Christiansen, in Norway. Using a tough hickory or ash base with a lighter body of spruce or basswood made for a lighter, springier ski and reduced the need to carve up thick planks of expensive hardwoods. But the flexible hide glues then in use were not strictly waterproof, so the skis tended to delaminate after a few days’ hard use. Meanwhile, in Glarus, Switzerland, carpenter Melchior Jacober launches what is apparently the first ski factory in Central Europe.

1905: An alpine unit of the French Army undertook the first series production of a Telemark-style ski in France, at Briancon.

1926: The segmented steel edge, invented by part-time mountaineer Rudolph Lettner of Salzburg, Austria, gave skis much better grip on hard snow while still allowing the wood to flex naturally. However, the segments had to be screwed into the ski, and tended to come loose. Worse, edge segments could break in two. In that case, it was difficult or impossible to continue skiing. Skiers usually carried spare edge segments, along with a screwdriver, screws and glue, to make field repairs.

1927: Two pairs of solid aluminum skis prototyped in France for Marie Marvingt, for use on sand and snow. 

1928: Swiss ski racer Guido Reuge invents the Kandahar binding, using a spring-loaded cable to hold the heel down for alpine skiing.

1932: The first successful three-layer laminated skis were invented by Bjørn Ullevoldsaeter in Norway and independently by George Aaland in Seattle. Because they were made with really waterproof casein glues, the skis did not delaminate easily and lasted much longer. When it was found that skis with vertically laminated cores proved lighter, livelier, and stronger, sales took off. The first of these skis were marketed under the Splitkein (“split-cane”) label in Norway and as Anderson & Thompson skis in the U.S.

1934: Limited production of solid aluminum ski by Joseph Vicky in France.

1936: Aluminum ski poles reach mass production in Saint-Ouen, France.

1937: R.E.D. Clark of Cambridge, England, developed the formaldehyde-based adhesive Aerolite to hold airplanes together– for instance, it was used in the all-wood deHavilland Mosquito bomber. Aerolite phenol glue is still manufactured by Ciba-Geigy. In 1941 he created Redux, used to bond aluminum and other impervious metals. 

1944: Cellulix, the first cellulose plastic bottom, made to go on Dynamic skis in France.

1945: The Vought-Sikorsky aircraft company used Redux glue to create Metalite, a sandwich of aluminum with a plywood core, for use in airplane skins. Three Chance-Vought engineers, Wayne Pierce, David Richey and Arthur Hunt, used the process to build an aluminum-laminate ski with a wood core. A thousand pairs of the Truflex ski were made but when aircraft production picked up, the company dropped the project and did not release the patent. It was the first mass-produced aluminum ski. It was more easily flexed than a wood ski, less easily broken, scarred or damaged. It did not warp with use.

1946: The Gomme ski was produced by furniture-maker Donald Gomme in England. A laminated wood core was sandwiched between two top plastic layers and a bottom metal layer, with a wood veneer sole to hold wax. It was the first ski to use three different layered materials. Gomme-equipped racers failed to impress the world at the 1948 Olympics and Gomme returned to making furniture.

1947: Pierce, Richey and Hunt founded TEY Manufacturing to produce the aluminum Alu 60, a hollow aluminum ski consisting of nested hat-section channels on top and a flat aluminum plate on the bottom, all bonded together using Redux adhesive.  It had drawbacks: The aluminum base stuck to soft snow and did not hold wax well, and the ski was essentially an undamped spring. The aluminum edges of the bottom plate wore out quickly. It was renamed Aluflex in 1948, its second year of production, and TEY shipped 12,000 pairs. But the undamped ski was nearly unskiable on hard snow, and the patent was sold to Johnny See-saw. TEY  instead developed the first snowmaking gun, an immediate commercial success. In 1955, the Aluflex patent was duplicated in Switzerland by Sikorsky engineer Serge Gagarin (TEY's sales agent) and assigned to  Attenhofer; the ski was manufactured by Charles Dieupart in France. Eventually, with the addition of a wood core, the design evolved to become the Dynastar MV2.  

1947: Howard Head, another aircraft engineer, created an aluminum sandwich ski with a lightweight plasticized-paper honeycomb core. The aluminum bottom had no steel edges. The ski was too light to track well, and broke easily when flexed. However, it worked well in powder and served as a prototype for the later successful Heads.

1948: TEY Tape, a self-adhesive cellulose plastic running surface, is invented by the TEY trio. It would adhere to either metal or wood skis. TEY tape did not stick to most snow and it could hold wax. It was sold as part of the Aluflex and also offered through ski shops for application to any ski. Disadvantage: TEY Tape was soft, and relatively easily ripped.

1948: Chris Hoerle of Torrington, Connecticut, created the stainless steel Chris ski, with an innovative continuous, low-drag, integral steel edge. This edge was quickly adopted by Head. The Chris ski usually had a TEY tape base. Hoerle made about 200 pairs but the ski was never brought to market.

1949: Howard Head’s plywood-core, pressure-bonded aluminum Head Standard with continuous integral steel edge began its journey toward becoming the most commercially successful early metal ski. It had a plywood core glued under pressure and heat between top and bottom aluminum sheets with plastic sidewalls. The bottom sheet had a continuous full length steel edge. It was the first successful ski made of very different components. The secret to success was Bostik, a flexible contact cement that allowed the different layers to shear against each other without weakening. Head skis, along with competitors and imitators, supplanted at least half the wood skis by 1960.

1949: Paul Michal at Dynamic patents a continuous, low-drag, hidden L-section steel edge for skis and uses it, with the Cellulix base, on his succeessful Dynamic K race skis.

1952: The first fiberglass-reinforced plastic ski, the Bud Phillips Ski, was not satisfactory enough to endure. The same applies to both the Holley Ski, created by Dan Holley of Detroit, and the Dynaglass ski by Dale Boison, both introduced in 1955. But these early attempts spread the idea of the possibility of a ski with more liveliness and less vibration than could be achieved with an aluminum ski. Designers saw that a fiberglass ski might be lighter and easier to turn than the best metal skis.

1954: The first polyethylene base is introduced in Austria by Walter Kofler. Kofix proved slippery enough in most snow conditions to eliminate the need for wax. It wass easy to repair minor scratches and gouges by melting more polyethylene into it. A similar material made by InterMontana in Switzerland is marketed under the brand name P-tex beginning in 1964. Polyethylene was gradually adopted by ski factories, and supplanted earlier plastic bases like Cellulix. With the addition of a polyethylene base, Howard Head introduces the final version of the Head Standard ski.

1954: Emile Allais, the pre-war world alpine champion, returns from five years working in North and South America, carrying several pairs of Head skis. He convinces Laurent Boix-Vives, new owner of Rossignol, to build the aluminum Metallais and Allais 60 aluminum skis, which revolutionize downhill racing beginning in 1959.

1959: The first successful plastic fiberglass ski was invented by Fred Langendorf and Art Molnar, in Montreal, and marketed under the Toni Sailer label. From then on, the concept spread rapidly. By 1968, fiberglass had supplanted both wood and aluminum for use in slalom racing skis and in most recreational skis. Aluminum laminates remained important for all high-speed skis (GS and downhill). Aluminum/fiberglass compound skis proved popular for recreational cruising and for use in deep powder.

1970: First fiberglass cross country skis introduced by John Lovett of Boulder, Colorado.

1970s: Steady improvement in plastic materials. Prepreg fiberglass construction proves efficient but very expensive. S-glass supplants E-glass in wet lay-ups. Manufacturers mix small quantities of Kevlar, carbon fiber, ceramic fiber and other high-strength materials into fiberglass to help improve strength, resilience, damping, torsion – or simply to improve marketing buzz. Sintered polyethylene begins to supplant extruded polyethylene as a tough, wax-retentive, high-speed base material.

1989: Volant skis, the first commercially manufactured steel ski, introduced by Bucky Kashiwa. The factory fails in 2001 due to high labor costs and production is moved to Austria. Some of the Volant production equipment is bought by David Goode, who uses it to produce a ski made largely of carbon fiber.

1990: Elan and Kneissl build prototypes of deep-sidecut “shaped” skis, escaping from the classic Telemark geometry toward a generation of easy-carving skis. Also see https://skiinghistory.org/history/evolution-ski-shape

They spent almost an hour in line, yet more and more skiers came, bonding as they waited  . . .  and waited.

Beginning after World War II and for the next 40 years, weekend skiers waited in lift lines so long that the person next to you had time to describe where he was born, his best powder day, his favorite music, why he deserved a promotion at the office, and . . . hey, look at that babe in the Bogner pants. Waiting could last an hour, all for a 12-minute ride up the mountain and the reward of a quick descent.

The problem of egregious lift queues, exasperating and bone-freezing,  arose from the relentless supply of young babyboomers demanding to ski. Their numbers exceeded the growth of new ski areas and lifts, even though that growth itself was spectacular. In the ten-year period between 1956 and 1966 alone, more than 580 ski areas with chairlifts and T-bars came into being, many of them previously equipped with rope tows. Yet it wasn’t enough. The number of U.S. skiers quintupled in the same period. And when a million or more of them arrived at the bottom of the mountain on a Saturday morning, the place looked like a standing-room-only Beatles concert. Waits of 45 minutes and more were common across the country, from Stowe to Boyne to Big Bear.

Some relief arrived with the advent of triple and quadruple seated lifts, but the big breakthrough came in the 1980s with the engineering of the detachable chair.  Climbing speed doubled. Time-wasting mishaps in boarding the lifts were sharply reduced. The new chairs and gondolas were people-eaters. In the last five years of the 20th Century alone, North American ski resorts installed 250 lifts capable of carrying more people uphill than all of the lifts that existed in the winter of 1965-66!

In the 1950s and 1960s, observed writer Morten Lund, lift lines allowed enough time “to meet a member of the opposite sex, get infatuated, engaged and plan the wedding.” Today, a Saturday or Sunday lift line scarcely allows time to work up an après-ski date. While no one wants to regress to long queues and slow lifts, history suggests that they once helped to develop skiing’s reputation as a sociable sport.