Technique

The "horse-kick" turn, introduced by Emile Allais, evolved into down-unweighting.

In the library of ski techniques, ruade is a rarity. At one time it had significant currency in some upper echelons of skiing but is now virtually extinct.

Illustration above: Édouard Frendo’s book introduced ruade—and down-unweighting—to the world.

It was developed in France in the 1940s, and championed by Emile Allais, for the purpose of making short-radius parallel turns. The French wanted skiers to get beyond the stem christiania as soon as possible, and felt that up-unweighting and shoulder rotation imposed too ponderous a tempo to work for short-radius, parallel turns, especially at lower speeds, on steeper slopes and in difficult snow.

What was needed at turn initiation was a way for a skier to unweight and rotate the skis in a single motion, then get the weight back down on the skis instantly. How do you do that on stiff, seven-foot wooden skis while wearing low, soft boots and using imprecise cable bindings?

The French solution was the ruade—literally a “horse-kick.” The idea was, starting from a tall stance, to pull the feet up and rock forward, thereby lifting the tails while keeping the tips planted on the snow. This was the

introduction of what would later be called down-unweighting. Start to finish, ruade was much quicker than up-unweighting, and it put the skier back on the snow in a lower, more athletic posture to control the rest of the turn. Keeping the tips on the snow provided a pivot point, making it easy to swing the tails sideways while they were unweighted. In loose snow this technique had the added benefit of getting the skis out of the snow during the edge change, thereby avoiding catching an outside edge.

In 1946, Édouard Frendo, then director of Chamonix’s École Supérieure de Ski et d´Alpinisme, provided a detailed exposition of ruade in his book Le ski par la technique française. He described the novel down-unweighting move this way: “The kick is executed only by a sudden bending of the legs under the thighs, by strong bending of the knees and maximum ankle flexion, without a jump. It therefore represents a considerable time saving and allows faster, shorter turns.”

It’s important to note the emphasis on the skier actively pulling the feet up. This isn’t passively down-unweighting by relaxing muscles in the legs, hips and back and letting your body fall. It’s actively down-unweighting by contracting muscles to make your body fold. This novelty would show up later, in a highly evolved form, in Jean-Claude Killy’s skiing. George Joubert called it avalement.

Allais followed in 1947 with his own book, which appeared in the U.S. under the title How to Ski by the French Method—Emile Allais’ Technic [sic]. This book was refreshingly light on text and laden with visuals, providing page upon page of graphically annotated photos and photo sequences.

Ruade comes to California

When Allais came to America in the late 1940s, he brought ruade with him. He had particular influence in California, especially at Squaw Valley, where he founded the ski school. Tyler Micoleau, a denizen of the early Tahoe ski area, wrote two books in the early 1950s, The Squaw Valley Story and Power Skiing Illustrated, in which he described Allais’ influence in general and the use of ruade in particular. California, a melting pot of different approaches to skiing, embraced ruade. Hans Georg, a Swiss veteran of the 10th Mountain Division who settled in Mammoth, gave it special mention in his 1954 book, Modern Ski Systems, and wrote a feature on the technique for the January 1956 issue of SKI.

It’s possible that this American infatuation with ruade was a misinterpretation of Allais’ message, focusing on the exotic and radical and interpreting it as essential and fundamental. It’s also possible that French nationalism motivated the École du ski français (ESF) program to highlight a technique that no one else had ever imagined. In a personal communication, Maurice Woerhlé recalls being told by Georges Joubert that, on returning from the U.S., Allais washorrified to learn that la ruade had become the final stage of the ESF program. Allais had regarded it mostly as a training tool. Bill Lash, who with Junior Bounous got to spend some time with Allais at Squaw Valley, similarly reports that Allais treated it as an exercise.

Ultimately, ruade in its mid-20th century form faded from sight. Woehrlé described it as “quasi-impossible to learn.” Better equipment reduced the need for such dramatic movements for making short turns, and the technique never osmosed very far beyond the Sierra Nevada

mountains in the U.S. The French, too, lost interest.

The technique’s fundamental components, however, didn’t disappear from skiing or, for that matter, from snowboarding. Active down-unweighting, which to my knowledge was first described in Frendo’s book, has been alive and well ever since. And the mechanism of making the skis turn by keeping the tips pressed to the snow while unweighting the rest of the ski is used all the time, even though it’s not a named technique in any system I know of. 

The author would like to thank Maurice Woehrlé and Bill Lash for their help in developing this article.

The keystone of skiing for decades, it’s largely been replaced by terrain-unweighting. 

Photos above: Fred Iselin demonstrates “lift and swing” in a stem christiania. From Invitation to Skiing, F. Iselin and A. C. Spectorsky, 1947.

Exhortations of “down-UP!” used to ring from the lips of instructors and aspirational skiers as they initiated their parallel turns with up-unweighting. Countless one-page instructional tips in ski magazines reminded readers of its importance. Today, this former foundation of sound skiing is considered déclassé by many technically minded skiers. What happened?

The idea of “unweighting,” freeing the skis from the snow to facilitate starting a turn, goes back to the earliest days of Alpine skiing. And the obvious method of doing it was to toss the body upward. This was expressed well by Charles Proctor and Rockwell Stephens in their 1936 book, Skiing – Fundamentals, Equipment and Advanced Techniques. “[the] Christiania … starts with a rise or upward lift of the body, followed by a pronounced dip… The primary purpose of the rise and dip is to unweight the skis, for it is obviously easier to flick the heels out and thus start the turn when they are unweighted than when the runner’s weight is pressing them down into the snow.” In the days when slopes were ungroomed and the skis were long and stiff, “flicking the heels” demanded some significant unweighting. Brute force was needed, and the big “down-UP!” provided it. The technique was a cornerstone in ski instruction systems of all nationalities. Tyros were introduced to the first part of the movement pattern with “Bend zee knees!” The “UP!” came with the stem christiania, coupled to a strong upper-body rotation in the direction of the new turn.

Even as slopes became packed down and upper-body rotation disappeared from some teaching systems, making short, snappy turns with stiff wooden skis was more of an exercise in linked edge-sets than the linked arcs that became possible with the second generation of metal and fiberglass skis. Linking those edge-sets required significant “flicking of the heels” and pivoting of the skis, which in turn required significant and prolonged unweighting. Up-unweight was still the obvious choice.

Except in moguls. Once there were enough skiers on the slopes to create them, skiers figured out that they could employ the bumps to do the unweighting. Better skiers realized that oftentimes a bump could provide too much lift, turning each mogul crest into a ski jump. To avoid catastrophe, they learned to make the “down” but forgo the “UP!” entirely. Skiers’ bodies were still getting projected upward, but it was being done by the terrain, not the legs. Whether or not this is up-unweighting is an academic question, but the “down-UP!” was gone. (Some called this “down-unweighting,” but many technical aficionados argue that down unweighting is something quite different.)

As skis and slope grooming steadily improved, the nature of short turns on all terrain has become more and more like skiing in moguls. The reason for this was revealed by Georges Joubert and Jean Vuarnet in their 1966 classic, How to Ski the New French Way (Comment se perfectionner à ski). At the beginning and end of a turn, the skis are traveling on a slope that is shallower than the fall line. So making a turn on a smooth slope is like skiing through a dip, and linking turns on that slope is like skiing through moguls. The sharper the turn and the steeper the slope, the bigger the “virtual bumps.”

A key aspect of improved ski design has also reduced the need for unweighting: The skis initiate turns more easily, and shape tighter arcs due to their shorter length and deeper sidecuts.

Through time, the details of the up-unweighting movement evolved. Before the Austrian school stormed the ski world with wedeln, short-swing and their innovative system of the late 1950s, skiers were taught to flex and extend at the ankles, knees, and waist. The new Austrian method encouraged skiers to do it all at the knees and ankles, thrusting the knees forward as they were bent, while remaining erect from the waist. This became the fashion, even though the best racers of the time bent much less at the ankles and more at the waist. In the mid 1960s, it became apparent that the best racers were skiing in more of a seated position: still bending their knees a lot, but bending more at the waist and less at the ankles. This presaged the advent of tall plastic boots in the 1970s that greatly limited the range of ankle flex but greatly improved the skier’s ability to work the skis. Since then, that way of moving up and down has remained with us.

Today, snow grooming and ski design are so good that not only is less unweighting usually required than in the old days, but that which is needed is often provided by the dynamics of the turn itself. The skier simply goes along for the ride or, in more dynamic turns, flexes to absorb the excess unweighting that the turn would otherwise produce.

This is not to say that up-unweighting is gone from the repertoire of the good skier. Whether you define up-unweighting as leg-powered lift, or broaden the definition to include terrain-induced lift, it’s still with us. Even under the narrower meaning, it’s the sharpest tool in the skier’s kit for many situations. Used with a bouncing rhythm, it’s a go-to technique for introducing tyros to powder snow, and all experts often find themselves doing a big down-UP with a forceful upper body rotation in heavy, unpacked snow. In good skiing generally, unweighting by extending is often useful, effective and commonplace. Moreover, it gives your leg muscles a chance to relax, expands your chest so you can breathe deeper, gives you a better view of the slope below, and just plain feels good. 

Whatever Happened to Avalement? "Swallowing" remains relevant today. Early photos made it look like back-seat driving.

Photo above: This photo montage from Georges Joubert and Jean Vuarnet’s 1966 Comment se perfectionner à ski, published in the U.S. as How to Ski the New French Way in 1967, shows Jean-Claude Killy performing avalement: deeply flexing in the transition between turns with a forward movement of the feet.

For many, simply hearing a faux francophone utter the word “avalement” conjures images of skiing’s French new wave of the early 1970s: Patrick Russell winning the FIS Championship slalom in Val Gardena. American hotdog skiers sitting waayyyyy back, supported by Jet Stix. And serious skiers everywhere coming to grips with a low, feet-apart stance often derided as “the outhouse crouch.”

I can’t think of another element of advanced ski technique that was so widely misrepresented, which misrepresentation led so many astray, yet was so important and continues to be so.

Avalement was a natural response to advances in ski design in the 1960s. When skis were made primarily of wood, and the only metal in them was their segmented steel edges, ski designers were faced with a tradeoff between making skis that were soft enough to be bent into reverse camber, yet strong enough to not break. Stein

Eriksen, for one, was known to be partial to softer skis because he could make a sharper, faster turn with them. On the flip side, he was also known for breaking more skis than others. As the sole structural material, wood also made it hard to produce a ski that, while flexible along its length, remained stiff in torsion, a design parameter tied to gripping on hard snow.

By using metal and fiberglass structural sheets to control the bending properties, engineers made skis that could flex more easily without breaking, and whose stiffness lengthwise and torsionally could be controlled more independently. Box-construction fiberglass skis, such as the Dynamic VR7, were particularly good in the latter regard.

Enter Jean-Claude Killy, thought by many to be the most technically innovative skier of our time. Killy understood better than anyone else—whether intuitively or cognitively—that the new skis could in many situations turn themselves by carving rather than being steered by the skier, and in a way that was more effective and

efficient. This led to some significant things happening in the turn: The skier didn’t need to apply as much pressure in the last part of the turn to make the ski bend, or angulate as much to make it hold. This allowed Killy to reduce and often eliminate the edge set that others made at the end of the turn. The ski could also be made to bend earlier in the turn, where there was less available pressure. So avoiding protracted unweighting going into the turn became desirable. Getting the skis engaged, bent, and drawing turning force from the snow earlier in the turn required that the skier be inclined earlier too, so as to be balanced against that force.

In short, making turns on smooth, packed snow became much like skiing in moguls. And what are the most distinguishing technical characteristics of mogul skiing?

Flexing at the end of the turn to absorb the force of the bump. Sliding your feet forward as you ski into the bump to prevent being pitched forward. Then extending once you’ve passed over the bump to keep your skis in contact with the snow for speed and direction control, and so you’re prepared to absorb the next bump.

Georges Joubert observed Killy’s movement of absorption and dubbed it “avalement.” Literally, “swallowing.” Dick Barrymore’s great documentary of the 1966 FIS World Championships, in Portillo, Chile, contains telling footage of Killy, Karl Schranz, Guy Périllat and others in the slalom. The difference between Killy and the rest is immediately evident. Just as striking is footage of Killy and Périllat training slalom on a rutted course. Where Périllat struggles to stay in the course, getting jolted by the ruts and leaving the snow going into every turn, Killy is unflappable.

In November 1967, SKI Magazine ran a cover story introducing avalement with the unfortunate headline “Look! They’re Sitting Back!” The article, written by Joubert and Jean Vuarnet, was far more nuanced than its title suggested. It was part of a series of articles that John Fry, SKI’s editor, ran to introduce America to Joubert and Vuarnet’s new book, How to Ski the New French Way. There was a wealth of worthwhile information in what was being published, but the skiing public was ready for a revolution and struck at the flashiest piece of bait: avalement.

The press recognized avalement’s appeal and played to it. Unfortunately, they often illustrated it with easily misconstrued photos of great skiers at extraordinary moments. As a result, legions of would-be avant-garde skiers were sent down a dead-end rabbit hole.

Did avalement die with the rise of extreme skiing or the advent of shaped skis? Hardly. The constant evolution of skis and ski boots, coupled with snow making and grooming, has enabled skiers to generate, to ever greater degrees, the very dynamics that gave rise to avalement in the 1960s. (Unfortunately, those same dynamics have been partly responsible for the rise in knee injuries.) We haven’t changed our technique, just our nomenclature. Cheapened by the misuse of the term in the ’70s and the ski community’s constant pursuit of novelty, “avalement” all but disappeared from our lexicon in the 1980s. Current fashion refers to the technique as “retraction.” Maybe in a few years we’ll call it “swallowing.” 

Regular contributor Ron LeMaster wrote about “The Comma Position” in the last issue of Skiing History (May-June 2021).

Form over function? Sure, with the help of stretch pants and cool hip angulation.

Those of us of a certain age remember the “comma position”: that very stylish, very modern, very Austrian stance many of us aspired to in the late 1950s through the ’60s. Its confluence with metal skis and stretch pants oozed cool modernity, helping elevate skiing culturally from an outdoor sport for vigorous sportsmen and women to an aspirational leisure activity for the upper middle class—akin to tennis and golf.

The comma position was old wine in a new bottle. It was hip angulation and its concomitant outwardfacing posture of the upper body—what came to be known as reverse shoulder and what we now call counter—but in a feet-together stance—and with stretch pants. Angulation, both at the hip and the knees, and counter had been essential elements of alpine skiing for a long time. They had played a more limited role in earlier decades, however, because the harder-to-turn skis of the era often required upper-body rotation from the skier to initiate a turn. That movement put the skier in a posture antithetical to hip angulation. Even so, in the later phases of many turns—especially on packed snow and in slalom turns—good skiers would angulate and counter.

As skis became more flexible, boots stiffer, bindings more solid and the slopes more packed, technique changed. A skier no longer had to throw the whole body into the turn, and the comma position emerged as a thing: an essential element of what the skiing world regarded as the new Austrian approach to skiing, epitomized by wedeln.

In fact, Stefan Kruckenhauser, Rudi Matt and the rest of the Austrian school responsible for codifying this style of skiing did not consider it uniquely Austrian. In their landmark book, The New Official Austrian Ski System, they asserted it was built on their study of the best skiers of all nations, especially racers, who skied similarly.

It’s hard to argue that the comma’s ultra-narrow, leg-and-feet together stance served a positive functional purpose. While hip angulation and counter were components of all the best competitive skiers’ technique, the tight stance never was. Its appeal was likely due to the way it aesthetically complemented stretch pants and to the fact that you had to be a pretty good skier in order to wiggle your way down the hill with such a functional handicap. The tight stance became to skiing what tail fins had become to American cars.

Stein Eriksen, certainly one of the best skiers of the twentieth century, employed significant angulation and counter during his dominating competitive career. But in the 1960s he carried the comma position to extremes. Sunlight seldom shone between his knees, and his commas came to look more like elbow macaroni. The public was wowed. Many aspired to ski that way. Few could. It looked sexy but was an example of form preceding function.

The narrow stance lost currency by the mid-1970s when most of the world moved on to the more feetapart, utilitarian look of “The New French Way,” which persists today. But skiers continued to angulate at the hips and counter with the upper body. They still do and always will, because those elements of ski technique—the functionally important components of the comma position—are essential to making turns on skis. Stretch pants or not, there’s no getting around that.

Toni Seelos and Dick Durrance helped build the bridge to the modern carved turn by letting skis "do their magic."

Photo above: Dick Durrance at Oak Hill, Hanover, New Hampshire in 1939. Lane Memorial Library.

In 1933, 18-year-old Dick Durrance returned to the U.S. from his boarding school days in Bavaria with a secret weapon he’d acquired while on the continent: a technique he’d seen Toni Seelos use to dominate his competition in the Alps. Up until that time, the stem Christiania was the ne plus ultra of ski turns. Hannes Schneider, imperator of the most influential ski school at the time, felt that the stem christie was all just about anyone needed to navigate in a controlled manner around the slopes.

Seelos, a racer, understood that Schneider’s favorite turn was inherently a braking maneuver, and figured out how to weave his way through race courses without getting his skis so sideways, especially the stemmed ski. What Seelos came up with, and what Durrance copied, is what we might consider the Cro-Magnon species of the modern parallel turn. And Durrance was the only skier in North America who used it.

In the fall of 1933, when Durrance began winning slalom races by 20 seconds and more for Newport High School in New Hampshire, the ski press badgered him for his secret. He called it the “Tempo Turn,” and the name stuck.

The tempo turn quickly became the talk of competitive skiers. In the 1934 edition of the U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association’s Annual, Otto Schniebs and John W. MCrillis wrote an article, “The High Speed Turn,” in which they dissected Durrance’s technique. In the text they referred to them as “high-speed turns,” but included a print of some movie frames of him skiing on pine needles and captioned as ‘a tempo.’” (Another article in the annual titled “Pine Needle Skiing,” by Henry E. Mahoney, describes the Newport Ski Club’s slalom and jumping training on the surface.)

What’s in a Name

As Durrance described it, the tempo turn was specifically the turn as Seelos executed it: in a tall stance with the feet close together. Durrance also said that particular style didn’t suit him well, and that he went on to develop a technique with a lower, feet-apart posture in which he was more stable.

Other prominent people in U.S. skiing didn’t bother to make the distinction. All turns made at speed with the skis parallel were tempo turns. Schniebs and McCrillis, in their book Modern Ski Technique, have a section titled “High-speed (Tempo) Turn” and in the 1936 book Skiing by Charles Proctor and Rockwell Stephens, there is a section titled “High-Speed Christiania (Tempo Turn).”

Up to this point, tempo turns were mostly considered a tool for racers and daredevils. The name “high-speed” said it all. Schniebs and McCrillis even warned that “The turn cannot be done without considerable speed.”

Then, in 1938, Benno Rybizka’s The Hannes Schneider Ski Technique presented us with “Parallel Christiania (Tempo Turn).” Finally, we had a name that was not only unintimidating, it was more descriptive.

Aspirational Turns

All avid skiers now had a technique to which they could aspire. And, not unimportantly, one that was clearly identifiable: It was pretty easy to see if you or your friends could make it down the hill without stemming.

The tempo turn wasn’t completely subsumed by the parallel turn, though. Fred Iselin and A. C. Spectorsky, in their 1947 book Invitation to Skiing, a well-illustrated and comprehensive instructional work based primarily on the Arlberg system, said “every tempo turn is a parallel turn, but not every parallel christie is a tempo turn.”

Their treatment of the tempo turn puts it, in its intent and execution, squarely in the category that Durrance did. It’s for going fast, and getting the ski to do the turning, not the skier. There wasn’t a big windup followed by upper-body rotation in the direction of the turn. Rather, you lean forward and toward the center of the turn, and let the skis do their magic. In this regard we might expand our view of the historical significance of the tempo turn to include being the progenitor of the carved turn: the aspirational turn of the 21st Century.

Dick Durrance himself would probably agree. In The Man on the Medal, John Jerome’s great biography, Durrance said, “With nothing but a weight shift, you could cut a carved turn, letting the camber of the ski do the turning for you. I called it the tempo turn
for some reason, and thought, ‘Boy, this is really the ticket.’” 

SKI LIFE

SKI Magazine, October 1973

1969: Modern ski techniques place much importance on pole planting for both long parallel turns and short swing. However, many advanced skiers have limited success in assimilating the latest refinements into their own skiing because their ski poles are too long. Long poles tend to set a skier’s weight back on his heels and interfere with setting up a good rhythm for short swing.

The old rule of thumb—that poles should reach up to the armpit—is obsolete, in the opinion of many instructors who now advocate shorter poles, particularly for advanced skiers. To check for proper pole length, place the tip of your pole in the snow as if you were about to make a turn. If your poles are short enough, the wrist-to-elbow section of your arm will be parallel to the ground. Checking proper length in a ski shop or in your home, place the pole grips on the floor, grasping the shafts just below their baskets. Again, your lower arm should run parallel to the floor.
—Stefan Nagel (Certified, U.S. Eastern Amateur Ski Association)

2020: In September 1969, when this tip appeared in SKI, the method it described might have been new to some, but was already current practice. Since then, good skiers have gradually migrated to shorter poles. A person who skied with 52-inch poles in the 1960s was probably using 50-inch poles in the 1990s, and might be skiing with 46-inch poles today. Competitive mogul skiers are likely to use poles even shorter than that.

But even though poles have gotten shorter, the method described in this tip still works. The key is to place the tip of your pole in the snow as if you were about to make a turn. In the illustration above, the skier is in a tall stance. For various reasons, the stance of good skiers at the moment they plant their poles has typically gotten shorter over the years, especially when making short turns. Keeping your forearm level to the snow dictates a shorter pole.

In the 1960s, skiers typically up-unweighted to start their turns. Today, they’re more likely to avoid actively unweighting, and in high-performance turns will flex through the transition between turns to absorb forces that would otherwise launch them off the snow. Competitive mogul skiers are at the extreme end of this spectrum, always deeply flexed at the moment they plant their poles. —Ron LeMaster 

In the 1960s, skiers generally stood taller when they planted their poles than they do today — as demonstrated in the photomontage (right) by Michael Rogan, current coach of the PSIA National Alpine Team. So while pole length has gotten shorter, the rule of thumb described in this timeless tip still applies. Photomontage by Ron LeMaster.

Finally perfected after 30 years, the carving ski failed to gain a following in North America. In its place, we got a ski that has made resort slopes less safe.

(Photo above: Modern “shaped” skis were originally developed to help racers achieve the pure, carved turn—eliminating the braking effect of skidding. Ron LeMaster photo)

For most of modern skiing’s history, the execution of a perfect turn has been an unobtainable ideal. Leather boots and wooden skis weren’t able to initiate and sustain a continuous, seamless carve. In the January 1967 issue of SKI magazine, Olympic gold medalist and Jackson Hole ski-school director Pepi Stiegler described a teaching method of getting the skis on edge so “the skis are literally carving the turn for you.” He called it the “Moment of Truth on Skis.”

“To start the turn, the skier should have the feeling of his weight going forward on the uphill ski and twisting the skis downhill. The resulting sensation is of a drift in the direction of the turn. At some split second during this process, the skier senses a moment to apply the edges and start the skis carving.”

At the time, the invention of plastic boots and the use of metal and fiberglass in ski design had brought the grail of the carved turn within reach. Stiegler, who became the NASTAR national pacesetter, clearly saw the desirability of recreational skiers knowing how to carve a turn.

The year before he died, the incomparable Stein Eriksen sent ski historian John Fry a package that included several photos of Stein in his iconic reverse-shoulder stance, along with a letter in which Eriksen asked Fry whether he should be considered the inventor of the carvedturn. Ever the diplomat, Fry replied that he doubted an uninterrupted carve was possible on 1950s-era equipment, “but if anyone could do it, it would be you.”

Perhaps the best-known apostle of the carved turn was Burke Mountain Academy founder Warren Witherell, who explained in How the Racers Ski (1972) what constituted a perfect carve: “In the very best racing turns, the entire edge of the ski passes over the same spot in the snow. The tip initiates the turn, biting into the snow and setting a track or groove through which the remainder of the ski edge flows.”

While Witherell’s gospel found faithful adherents in the race community, it failed to ignite interest among recreational skiers—in part because carving on a long,

narrow ski was still a difficult skill to develop. While Witherell was preaching to the coaching choir, the public’s attention turned to the counter-culture phenomenon known as hotdog skiing, a.k.a. freestyle. Short skis would soon be all the rage, both as a means of abbreviating the learning curve and as a superior tool for moguls, aerials and ballet.

The concept of carving recaptured a toehold in the public’s consciousness with the advent of snowboarding and images of a steeply angled board sending up geysers of powder. The popularity of snowboarding and its short learning curve challenged ski designers to reconsider their assumptions about ski dimensions.

By 1995 there were just enough wasp-waisted models to muster a carving-ski category worthy of examination by Snow Country, where I oversaw the magazine’s testing. Over the next two seasons, deep-sidecut carving skis would render the relatively shapeless skis that preceded them obsolete. The universal acceptance of shaped skis appeared to augur a new world in which everyone would henceforth carve turns because every ski was a carving ski. The nirvana envisioned by Stiegler in the 1960s had been attained. (For the history of shaped skis, visit https://skiinghistory.org/history/evolution-ski-shape.) But...it didn’t happen.

The disruptive force that altered the path of ski design began innocently enough. When Atomic introduced the Powder Magic in 1988, its target audience was the heli-skiing patron who no longer would tire quickly in the bottomless snow, thanks to the new fat skis.

All the ski designer had to do to make the fat ski easier to steer was lift the tip and tail out of the snow, leaving a short foundation underfoot that could be swiveled side to side much more easily than it could be tilted on edge. The ski forebody, instead of seeking connection with the snow, now performed the same function as a Walmart greeter: It’s friendly but otherwise plays no part in what goes on behind it.

If Warren Witherell was the evangel of carving, the Pied Piper of the emerging fat ski was Shane McConkey. McConkey wanted a better tool for attacking bottomless snow in extreme terrain. He persuaded his sponsor, Volant, to create the Spatula. The Spatula was the embodiment of the anti-carver, with a reverse sidecut and reverse camber. It inspired an explosion in the wide, rockered, all-terrain ski designs that currently dominate the U.S. market.

In the European Alpine countries where skiing has always had a broader base of participation, the notion that carving was a teachable skill found fertile soil. To this day, carving perfect turns on prepared slopes is central to the European ski experience.

Carving never caught on in America. A carved turn is best practiced on groomed terrain. Americans were more attracted to the versatility afforded by an all-mountain ski. By definition, “all-terrain” includes powder, and proficiency in deep snow depends on width. The appeal of skiing the entire mountain, and being properly equipped for the rare powder day, outweighed the allure of making a perfect turn every day.

Americans were enticed away from carving skis by fat skis that enabled skiers to easily swivel their way downhill. Lower-skill skiers can access ungroomed terrain they didn’t have the confidence to try before. But on regular groomed terrain at high speed, fat skis with limited edge contact don’t make for better or safer skiers. Quite the opposite. I’ll bet there aren’t ten people reading this who either haven’t been involved in a skiing collision, had a close call or knows someone who has been hit. The bottom line: Skis with waists from 75-90 millimeters would better serve the vast majority of skiers rather than models that are 100 millimeters and above. The wide platform of fatter skis does provide stability, but the trade-off in loss of quickness and edge control is not worth the price.

In a recent member survey, seniorsskiing.com found out-of-control, fast and reckless skiers and snowboarders to be the number-one grievance about the resort experience. “A few jerks skiing dangerously” and “risk-takers who don’t turn on groomers” far surpassed complaints about lift ticket prices, cafeteria food quality, and long walks to and from parking lots.

Carving skis offered a means of enabling skiers to control their speed and trajectory. The proliferation of highly specialized powder skis being used as everyday skis has had exactly the opposite effect. Not only are these skiers personally at risk, but everyone who shares our crowded slopes with them is also potentially in harm’s way.

Jackson Hogen is the editor of Realskiers.com, which tests and evaluates ski equipment. He is past General Secretary of the ASTM Committee on Ski Safety, and past Chairman of SIA’s Skiing Safety Committee. 

By Ron LeMaster

1967: You need balance, courage and most of all proper angulation for a good sharp parallel turn. All these qualities can be built up by a little acrobatic exercise which I call the Javelin Turn, but which is really an exaggerated, intentional crossing of the fronts of the skis. There is no other exercise that illustrates so clearly how the hip must be placed for angulation in the parallel turn. In normal parallel skiing, the inside ski, boot, leg and hip must lead the turn. In the Javelin, the inside of the body has to lead or you will fall.
To practice the Javelin turn, start off as in any parallel turn, and then pick up the inside ski of the turn. As the turn progresses, keep pointing the tip of the lifted ski farther and farther to the outside of the turn, so that by the end of the turn, the lifted ski is at right angles to the tracking ski. Make sure to keep the tip of the lifted ski well off the snow.

Two or three Javelin turns early in the day will get you set in the correct, powerful “lead with the inside” that is the secret of a really good carved parallel turn. —Arthur Furrer (Ski School Director, Bolton Valley, Vermont)

2019: The exercise described here has been in constant use by savvy instructors and coaches since it was described in the pages of SKI Magazine by Art Furrer in 1967. A Swiss “trick skier” who was featured many times in SKI during the 1960s, Furrer named the maneuver after the model of ski he promoted at the time: the Hart Javelin.

To this day, the Javelin Turn is the go-to exercise for developing good hip angulation and its concomitant countered posture, in which the pelvis and torso face somewhat toward the outside or downhill ski. That posture is a key element of what American instructors commonly refer to now as “upper and lower body separation.” Javelin turns also demand that the skier balance over the outside ski, another important skill.

This article first appeared in the January-February 2020 issue of Skiing History.