Sven Coomer - Ski boot design pioneer, Olympian

Sven Coomer’s lasting legacy is the ski boot you use today. He’s the guy who made plastic ski boots work well. Before Coomer, plastic boots were narrow, badly padded and painful. Barely covering the ankle, they offered inadequate leverage to fully use the new generation of fiberglass slalom skis. The term “Lange bang” described the common experience of the original plastic boots.

Coomer died in Carbondale, Colorado, on March 10, of heart failure, with his children Robin and Seth by his side. He was 84.

Coomer was raised in Sydney, Australia, and after training as a world class swimmer, became the youngest competitor at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics (in modern pentathlon). He went on to study product design in Sweden, where he learned to ski. During that period he was secretly recruited into British Special Forces and participated in the covert operation to bring the Dalai Lama out of Tibet. A brilliant natural athlete, he trained with the French ski team, taught skiing in Australia, then emigrated to the United States where he became ski school director at Solitude, Utah and then Mt. Rose, Nevada. There he coached the McKinney kids. In 1968, Doug Pfeiffer at Skiing Magazine hired him as a ski tester.

In 1969, under contract to Nordica, Coomer set out to create the ideal slalom racing boot. Beginning in 1971, he launched a series of revolutionary boots that established the pattern for every high-performance ski boot built since then, beginning with the high-top leather Nordica Sapporo and plastic Olympic, then the Astral Slalom, Grand Prix, GT, Meteor and Comp 3. Coomer-designed boots fit precisely and comfortably, and introduced the removable liner that adapted readily to the skier’s foot. He created the integral high-back “spoiler” and extended tongue, to set the ankle in its strongest position and enable full leverage in powering modern race skis. He designed three-piece race boots, including models still in production today. He invented the power strap that closes the cuff on all modern high performance boots. All these innovations were immediately successful in World Cup and Olympic racing and were imitated by boot factories around the world. He founded the Footloose ski shop in Mammoth Lakes as a laboratory for developing new bootfitting techniques. He consulted on breakthrough boot designs for Nordica, Munari, Koflach, Head and Atomic.

With Dennis Brown, Coomer went on to invent the custom-built footbed, and trained several generations of retailers in the new art of custom boot fitting. Coomer then launched ZipFit, manufacturing and selling top-quality innovative innerboots for Alpine skiing. He was elected to the US Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2022.

Sven Coomer brought comfort and ski-control power to millions of skiers worldwide. Over a 50-year career he created the boots used by alpine champions from Paquito Fernández Ochoa and Tamara McKinney to Marcel Hirscher and Mikaela Shiffrin. He showed the way forward for an entire industry, and is justly regarded by that industry as its best and most prolific designer.