Equipment

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.

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.

When the first “shaped” skis arrived at ski shops in 1993, they were a revelation.

Deep sidecuts to help skis carve short, clean turns had been sneaking up on us for a century – so slowly that only a very few savvy ski designers, largely outside the mainstream Western European factories, could see them coming.

Sidecut – the subtle hourglass shape of the ski – goes back to skiing’s prehistory. It was invented by now-forgotten artisans sometime before 1808 and was adopted universally after being popularized by Sondre Norheim and his friends in Telemark, Norway, around 1856. Early skiers, who carved their own skis, found that pinching in the waist of the ski made it easier to turn. Since that time, the “straight” ski with parallel edges has been a rarity, enjoying real popularity only as a light cross country ski for use in modern machine-set tracks, and for modern jumping skis. In alpine skis, sidecut shape has grown gradually deeper over the decades, stalling for about five decades starting in 1936, and at a greatly accelerated pace since 1988.

In the beginning: 4mm of sidecut

The original Telemark skis were carved by hand in home workshops, and the dimensions could vary quite a bit. But a typical Norheim-era ski, as represented in modern replicas from Morgedal, measured 81mm across the shovel, 67mm at the waist, and 70mm across the tail, for a sidecut depth of 4.25mm. (These skis, patterned after Sondre Norheim’s own work, were built to commemorate the 1988 Calgary Olympics.) Telemark dimensions worked well for Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, and this standard shape was still relevant midway through the 20th century, when ski manufacturers began to think about making skis of metal and fiberglass in elaborate molds.

Sidecut depth means that if we put the ski on a table and tilt it up so the base or sole is at a right angle to the tabletop, resting on the widest points of the tip and tail, then the distance from the ski’s waist to the table is, in the case of the original Telemark model, 4.25mm. (Today’s turny slalom skis have a sidecut depth of about 18mm.) Based on the ski’s running surface length (that is, the length of edge in contact with the snow, excluding the turned-up tip), the radius of the sidecut curve is 83 meters – very long by modern standards, but certainly not straight. The geometry worked well enough for running and jumping skis, and it changed very little into the 1930s, when a typical 230cm jumping ski (91-77-80mm) still had a sidecut of 4.25mm, and an agile 192cm women’s cross country ski might be 88-73-80mm, for a sidecut depth of 5.5mm and a turny radius of 47m – about half that of the jumper.

This basic shape was still viable when Howard Head cranked out his first aluminum Standards in 1950. The 79-inch version of that ski (203cm) measured out at 81-68-77mm, for a sidecut depth of 5.5mm and a 62 meter radius.

Experiments in carved wood: 7mm of sidecut

When skis were made of carved hickory, it was pretty easy for a craftsman to experiment with sidecuts. The workmen at Thor Groswold’s factory were among the more innovative talents. They were happy to build a ski to an athlete’s specifications, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone who has watched him ski to learn that Dick Durrance liked a very turny shape. The 206cm Durrance signature model, from around 1939, measures 74-54-62mm. This is remarkably narrow for an alpine ski, unless it was meant exclusively for running slalom on ice. What most folks didn’t notice was that the ski offered a dramatic increase in sidecut depth to 7mm (radius 42 meters). And a wider GS-style ski, the 212cm Barney McLean model from 1950, ran 90-73-81 – sidecut depth 7.25mm and radius 48 meters.

The 7mm sidecut depth became the new standard for race skis, good for the next four decades. The Kastle slalom used by the 1964 medalists Pepi Stiegler, Billy Kidd and Jimmie Heuga had a 6.75mm depth on a 64mm waist; the 1968 Rossignol Strato and Dynamic VR17 measured 6.75 and 6.5mm on a 69mm waist; and as late as 1983, the Rossignol SM GS ski still used the Strato shape (the contemporary FP slalom ski was narrower – and straighter). The big innovation, introduced by Dynamic in 1967, was to move the waist back about six inches, from the ball of the foot to the heel. The change was hardly noticeable to the eye, but it helped the great French racers of the era to accelerate out of the end of the turn.

The Mahre brothers raced and won on slalom and GS skis with a 7mm sidecut depth, patterned after the French race skis. From 204cm down, K2’s molds emulated the VR17 slalom shape. From 207cm up, they used the Strato GS shape. The Mahres were so successful on the 710 and VO Slalom that the shape was widely imitated in Austrian factories – thus the first Fischer Vacuum Technique slalom was a mirror image of the VO, which of course was patterned closely on the original VR17. All these skis featured a stiff tail, cracked edges, a sidecut shape close to 7mm and a waist width close to 68mm, making for a radius of 48 to 51m. Atomic, Kastle, Blizzard and Volkl all built their own versions of this ski.

Ingemar Stenmark held an advantage over the Mahres, skiing on an Elan shape with an 8mm sidecut depth, giving him a 20% shorter turning radius of about 41 meters (it's now reported that Stenmark liked to file an extra millimeter off each edge at the waist, which would have given him a 9mm depth and a 37m radius). Partly to save money, many skimakers liked to have single set of molds, so during this era, if you wanted a full-length Elan ski, you got the company’s standard “Uniline” sidecut shape. The big differences between models were in flex pattern and materials – slalom skis had stiffer tails, GS skis had aluminum layers, recreational skis had a softer, rounder flex. If you were to graph the evolution of sidecut, the line would show a flat spot from 1940 to 1980, an era when most skis stalled at the 6 to 7mm depth.

Snowboards shake up the scene

Something dramatic happened in the mid-70s: snowboards. Snowboard designers owed no loyalty to ski design. The 1975 Burton Backhill Board, a plywood plank 140cm long, with no steel edges or plastic base, sported a radical sidecut shape of 302-265-295mm, for a sidecut depth of 17mm and a radius of just 6 meters. The shape set a pattern — a modern 155cm freeride board typically has dimensions of 302-257-302mm for a radius of 7 meters.

Most ski designers ignored this phenomenon, though we often hear the myth that ski designers learned all about sidecut from snowboarders. Around 1979, Head’s chief engineer John Howe and marketing chief Gary Kiedaisch came up with the concept Natural Turning Radius, under which short, agile recreational skis would have a slightly deeper sidecut than the factory’s long high-speed cruising and racing skis. The idea reached the market in 1981, when the 180cm Head Yahoo (92.5-71.5-80mm), with a 7.3mm sidecut, offered a turn radius of about 35 meters. The company didn’t go so far as to build deep-sidecut molds, but Kiedaisch produced a pocket-size flexible aluminum ski for salespeople to use in demonstrating how a carved turn works. The sales tool had an exaggerated sidecut, and some people who saw it thought, “Hmm, why don’t they make real skis that way?”

Albert goes wild

In 1984, an executive at Olin Corp. had been having trouble learning to ski. He asked Frank Meatto, an engineer at the company’s ski division, why the factory couldn’t build a sort of Prince tennis racquet for skiers – something that would make the learning process a lot easier. Meatto, along with Ed Pilpel, had been working on designs for a better race ski, and had an idea that the key to a great teaching ski would be a deep sidecut. According to Pilpel, Meatto came up with “Albert,” which ski industry insiders consider the first of the modern shaped skis. Albert, named after a plastic toy belonging to Meatto’s dog – had a very fat tip and ridiculously narrow waist: according to Pilpel, the dimensions were 128-40-79mm. The prototype would have had a sidecut depth of 31mm and a radius of 8 meters. The swollen tip wouldn’t fit in Olin’s presses, so Meatto had to figure out how to make it narrower without sacrificing the deep sidecut. At the time, racers skied a very one-footed technique, leaping from inside edge to inside edge. Meatto wondered if they even needed an outside edge. He sliced Albert almost in half and prototyped an asymmetric 150cm ski, with a ruler-straight outside edge and a radical sidecut on the inside edge with a 10 meter radius. The waist wasn’t wide enough to accommodate a ski boot, so Meatto engineered an elevated Delrin platform to carry the bindings. He took out a patent covering the deep sidecut and the leverage advantage of the platform, specifying that the ski edge ran close to the centerline of the bootsole, like an ice skate. Olin produced a run of 150 pairs for introduction at the 1986 SIA Trade Show. Instructors who tested it thought Albert was a fabulous idea, but retailers thought the asymmetric hourglass shape far too cartoonishly weird and declined to buy it. Albert slid into obscurity, but the patent drawings lived on in Olin’s corporate legacy, to surface in other offices.

Powderfats

In 1988, Atomic engineer Rupert Huber was asked to create a better powder ski. By this time, like most ski factories, Atomic was building snowboards. It seemed logical to Huber to use the capacious floatability of a wide snowboard as a powder ski, so he simply bandsawed a snowboard in half, turned its steel edges inward, and put ski bindings on it. The production version became the Atomic Powder Plus, at 133-115-122mm the world’s first superfat powder ski – with a traditional straight-ski sidecut depth of 6.25. But a year later Volkl began work on its mid-fat Explosiv; the original 190cm version carried a profile of 118-94-110mm, for a sidecut depth of 10mm and a scary-short radius of 28 meters — helping this massive metal ski to feel reasonably agile underfoot.

The 10mm race ski

During the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, giant slalom racing changed. The Brothers Mahre and their chief rival Ingemar Stenmark developed a faster, straighter line from gate to gate, with a tighter, slalom-like turn. Course-setters responded by placing GS gates further across the fall line. According to K2 engineering chief Jim Vandergrift, by the late ‘80s GS had become a race of round turns across the hill. A few race ski designers began to think about pushing the sidecut depth up to 9 or 10mm. For race stock GS skis, used exclusively on hard snow, it was easy to make the waist narrower. Most of the European factories put their racers on new limited-production skis with a waist width around 62mm and a sidecut radius around 32 meters. By comparison the Rossignol SM VAS ski sold to the public had a 69mm waist for a radius of 48 meters.

At K2, designer Walter Knott remembers, “We figured we needed a little deeper sidecut to help the racers make a cleaner turn.” Thus was born, in 1990, the aluminum K2 GS Race, with its 10mm sidecut (my pair of 205s actually measures 10.6) and, in 1991, a fiberglass version for fast recreational skiing, the Velocity. These skis were a delight for fast skiing on groomed snow. A good skier quickly learned to start the turn with a touch more edge tilt – and a lot less steering. You got less tail slip at the beginning of the turn, and noticeably more speed through the entire arc. Volant followed on, in 1992, with the Zmax G, a fast racer/cruiser with a radical 12mm sidecut. On groomed Western snow, the G lived up to its name, in every sense. The first time I made a run on these, I found myself catapulting from arc to arc with effortless speed. The young racing star Amy Livran said “Hey, where have you been training?” It was becoming clear that better sidecut could make us all better skiers. By ’93, Dynastar also had a 12mm cruiser, the G9 race ski. K2 revised the Velocity as the MSL, which in its second year featured a 12mm sidecut. K2 also sold a version of the Volkl fat ski as the Big Kahuna, specifying an 11.5mm sidecut.

Other race ski designers were thinking along similar lines. In 1991, Bernhard Russi created a very twisty, technical downhill course for the 1992 Olympic venue on Bellevarde Face in Val d'Isere, a course clearly designed to favor very technical skiers like Gunther Mader, who had won World Cup races in slalom, GS, Super G and combined. At least one factory responded with experimental, turnier downhill skis. Little-known Austrian racer Patrick Ortlieb, who had never won a World Cup downhill, took gold on a slim-waisted Head ski, barely edging out Franck Piccard, 1988 Olympic Super G champ, on an Atomic-built, Dynamic-branded ski. Mader took third on Fischer. The speed specialists who finished at the top of World Cup downhill standings that year -- Franz Heinzer, Daniel Mahrer and AJ Kitt -- finished more than a second back. Race rooms are always very secretive about what they do, and in the era before FIS imposed rules on ski dimensions, there was no reason to reveal the actual sidecuts of downhill skis. 

Meanwhile, an Austrian ski instructor named Reinhard Fischer published a paper on the "accelerating turn" with the Austrian Ski Association. He theorized that a deep-sidecut ski would enable that turn and in 1980 began pitching the deep-sidecut ski design to major Austrian factories. Blizzard, Atomic and Kneissl responded to Fischer’s overtures by making prototypes for testing, with radius as short as 35 meters. Most of the test skis were long – around 200cm – and in on-snow testing the factories judged the skis unsuitable for most recreational skiers using the typical skidded-parallel techniques of the era.

Breakthrough

But the real breakthrough came from out in left field. Jurij Franko graduated from the University of Ljubljana in 1983, with a degree in engineering, and joined Elan in ’87 as a lab manager. In 1988, he had an idea for a deep sidecut ski, and his colleague Pavel Skofic calculated a suitable flex pattern. They organized a project dubbed Sidecut Extreme – SCX – and set out to build prototypes. (Jurij Franko is often confused with his schoolmate Jure Franko, whose successful World Cup career was capped by a silver medal in giant slalom at the Sarajevo Olympics.)

Over the next couple of years some very strange skis emanated from Franko’s lab. Back in 1977 Elan had produced a run of Variable Sidecut System skis, or VSS, slotted along the centerline through the shovel and tail. Across the top of each slot was a jackscrew, so the skier could adjust the width of the shovel and tail and thus the sidecut. It was a crude experiment, but it produced data that helped Franko and Skofic zero in on a new sidecut shape. Franko’s calculation was straightforward: “Choose the radius of the turn — 10 meters, for example. Choose the speed you want to ski — 5 meters per second for example. Calculate the centrifugal force and the lean angle, as for a bicycle. This is the angulation of the ski. Imagine a ski of constant width bent to the radius of the turn and penetrating through the snow. ‘Cut’ the ski with the snow surface, and there you are!”

By 1991 Franko and Skofic had finalized a 203cm mold for a GS race ski with a 110-63-105mm profile – that’s a 22.25mm sidecut, three times what most racers were using for slalom at the time. Sidecut radius was just 15 meters – about 35 percent of Jure Franko’s medal-winning Elans from ‘84.

The SCX was blazingly fast on the GS course. In its first local races, skiers on the SCX took eight of the top ten places. The new ski conformed more easily to the actual arc required to carve a clean turn in the racecourse. For any given turn, the racer needed less edge angle, and could therefore stand on a straighter, stronger leg. Folks on the World Cup circuit woke up.

In the Austrian Tyrol, Kneissl was trying to scramble back into the international market. In the late ‘70s the Tyrolian factory had tried to streamline production by converting to injection-molded foam-core construction for all its skis. The result was a marketing fiasco and bankruptcy. The company went through several ownership changes, and from 1986 to 1989 was partnered with Olin and Trak as part of Tristar Sports. Kneissl designers may have seen the Albert drawings. By 1990, reduced to being the local Tyrolean brand, Kneissl had resorted to making the “Bigfoot” novelty ski, a strange 80cm snowskate pitched at casual skiers. The Bigfoot, which featured a tip shaped like a set of toes, could strap to ordinary shoes as easily as to ski boots, and had a snowboard-style deep sidecut. Early in 1992, designer Wolfgang Wagner thought the deep sidecut might make an interesting recreational ski, and came up with the 180cm Ergo at 100-62-100mm – 19mm of sidecut depth, with a radius of 14 meters. Kneissl took the prototype to ISPO, the European trade show, that spring. Reinhard Fischer considered that the design derived from his drawings. 

The Revolution: Carving for everyone

By April ’93, Elan’s sales organizations in Europe and North America had seen the SCX prototype. Mike Adams, marketing director in the U.S., sent four sets of samples out to ski instructors around the country, including Bill Irwin at Killington and this author at Squaw Valley. I was amazed at what the ski would do – it made me instantly the equal of the best skiers on the mountain, in any kind of snow. More to the point, when I put a middle-aged intermediate-level student on the Kneissl Ergo, she was immediately able to carve clean turns in spring corn, over rotten crust. I put her husband on the SCX, and he could do the same. The couple were the novelist Amy Tan and her husband Lou deMattei – and they may have the honor of being the first ski school clients ever to learn to carve on modern shaped skis. All the instructors who tried the SCX called Adams back and said “I don’t know what this is, but it’s a fabulous teaching tool,” or words to that effect.

Adams got the message. Franko and Skofic spent the summer creating a shorter version, scaling everything down but keeping the same radius. The result was a 163cm teaching ski for adults, and a 143cm junior race model. By December, Adams was demonstrating the short SCX to ski school directors and resort managers. “Everyone who skied on it was blown away,” Adams recalls.

Another Balkan racer was thinking along the same lines. Ivan Petkov retired from the Bulgarian ski team in 1976 and took up windsurfing. He designed and built a line of “Bora” sailboards and won the national championships three times between 1977 and 1980. He came to the US in 1987, to spend the summer in Hood River and the winter teaching skiing in Aspen. By 1989 he was managing a retail operation for Robbie Naish on Oahu, and while watching the craftsmen there carve custom sailboards, got the idea for a new carving ski. In the spring of 1992 he went back to the resort town of Pamporovo, in the Rhodope mountains of southern Bulgaria. There, Atomic had set up a factory to make some of their inexpensive constructions.

“I had them make a mold for a 187cm ski with a profile of 113-61-91,” Petkov says. “We couldn’t find a wide-enough base material, but they also made water skis there so we got some greenish-blue polyethylene and cut the base out of that. I took three or four pairs in different flexes and went to Mt. Hood. We were amazed at how well they held.”

Petkov called his new product the S-Ski, for its turn shape. He applied for a patent on the geometry. He ordered more skis in 183 and 193cm lengths, and went to the SIA Trade Show in the spring of ’93. “Everyone came to the booth,” Petkov remembers. “Warren Witherell (author of How the Racers Ski) was very excited.” He shipped 300 pairs. The 183cm sample in the Colorado Ski Museum measures 115-61-85, for a 19.5 sidecut depth and a 15 meter radius.

For 1994, there were shorter lengths, 163 and 178cm, and Petkov sold 1200 pairs. S-Ski was on a roll, but Petkov was unhappy with Pamporovo’s quality, and opened negotiations with Blizzard to build his ski.

Wagner, Franko and Petkov settled on shorter lengths for a simple reason: When the tip and tail grew wider, a full-length ski felt intolerably heavy – there was simply too much mass out there at the end of the lever. The 208 version of the K2 GS Race, for instance, felt as ponderous as a downhill race ski, and it was called by insiders The Hammerhead. The solution was to shorten the ski dramatically. When average width rose 13% (from 72mm to 83mm), length needed to fall 13% (from 204cm to 178cm). Bearing surface area remained the same, and so did material weight. But the turn radius – proportional to the square of the running surface length – fell dramatically. Additional mass at the tip and tail, combined with improved edge contact through the turn, meant that the new 180cm skis could be as stable as the old straight 205s. Another design change proved essential: the ski had to be stronger and stiffer through the center to prevent the wider tip “hinging” upward in bumps and deep snow.

Atomic, Fischer and Head had taken notice and quietly began to design 15mm sidecut skis of their own. There was the Fischer Revolution Ice (92-62-92mm), the Head Cyber 24 (94-61-90mm), and a whole group of identical skis marketed under the Atomic-built labels: Atomic, Dynamic, Hart, Rohrmoser, Colt. “It turns out that everything we thought we knew for forty years was wrong,” admitted one Austrian ski designer. But the big Western factories – notably Rossignol/Dynastar, Salomon and K2 – seemed somnolent in the face of impending revolution. “Shapes are a fad,” snorted a senior executive for one French skimaker.

There was a good economic reason for their delay. 1990 was the year Salomon entered the ski market with its “cap” ski – a good conventional ski with a seamless one-piece plastic top to replace the traditional “square” sidewalls and topskin. The streamlined look was really just a simpler way to make skis but, billed as a “monocoque” structure, it took the world by storm. By ’93, factories around the world saw their business eroded by the Salomon invasion and decided to invest millions in new molds to build cap skis. With crash programs under way to compete with Salomon, few plant managers wanted to spend additional millions creating molds for deep sidecuts. As late as 1994, Rossignol built an entire factory for rapid manufacture of the injection-molded 4SV cap ski, with a painfully straight 7mm, 83-64-73mm profile – and the factory didn’t yet have a shaped ski in progress.

Many factories went bankrupt trying to keep pace with Salomon. Among them was Blizzard, which slid into the control of the banks during ’94 and ‘95. But the factory already had Petkov’s S-Ski mold, and began producing its own cap-ski version that spring. Meanwhile Pamporovo made versions of the original S-Ski for other brands.

But Elan, the odd little factory in Begunje, Slovenia, was never threatened by the Salomon monocoque. Presciently, in 1990 it had developed its own cap ski, the MBX Monoblock. By ’94 Monoblock sales subsidized the creation of a complete set of cap-style SCX molds. Elan not only had a lead in shaped skis, it had a catchy name for them: “When Jurij tried to describe the turn shape to a journalist, he used the word parabolic,” Adams recalls. “And that’s what we named the ski.”

Bode Miller and mainstream acceptance

Engineers at K2 at last paid attention. In the spring of ’94, without reference to the Albert patent, a series of internal memos defined the profiles for what would become the K2 Four, Three and Two. The shovels wouldn’t be as wide as the 105+mm Elan, Kneissl and S-Ski, because all of K2’s wide presses were busy building snowboards. With a width limit, the Four wound up with dimensions of 98-65-87 – a 14mm sidecut depth, describing a 22 meter radius at the 195cm length. When the mold was finally cut the following year, the result arrived in New England just in time for a young racer named Bode Miller to try it out in the ’96 Junior National Championships. In four events at Sugarloaf that March, Bode took three firsts and a second. Overnight every Master’s racer in the country needed a pair of K2 Fours just to be in the game.

The word was out: If you wanted to keep up with the hot guys, you needed shaped skis. Traditional 7mm “straight” skis began to pile up in warehouses. Salomon and Rossignol had hundreds of shipping containers full of slick, straight, heavily discounted cap skis. In ’96, playing catch-up, Salomon began work on the Axendo series (99-64-89mm; 15m) and hired Mike Adams away from Elan. Rossignol created a series of Cut 10.4 shaped skis (104-62-94; 19m) at a dramatically reduced price and shoehorned them into every rental inventory they could reach.

That winter, Petkov realized he’d been undercut by Blizzard and Pamporovo: both factories planned to compete with him using his own mold. He turned to K2, which offered to build skis in his dimensions. The Vashon Island factory backed out of the deal when Petkov threatened to enforce his patent against any and all factories, including his own supplier. With no one to build his product, Petkov’s S-Ski slid from sight.

By 1997, shapes had proliferated in all directions. There were fat shapes for powder, called Chubbs and Fudds and midfats. It was possible to buy deep shapes, moderate shapes, race shapes, carver shapes, powder shapes, expert shapes, learn-to-carve shapes and learn-to-ski shapes. Straight skis were piled in clearance racks across the country for $29.95.

In the new century, shapes have grown so radical that the International Ski Federation has imposed limits. Today a FIS-legal GS ski must have a radius of at least 21 meters – that’s K2 Four territory. Civilians can buy an “oversize” illegal GS ski – designed before the rules went into effect – for fast cruising, and that has in fact become a popular category among non-racing experts. And a slalom race ski must be at least 155cm long (for men – 150cm for women). Something as radical as the K2 Seth Pistol – meant for huge jumps and stunts in powder – with its 128-90-115mm, 14 meter radius, looks conservative next to a full-boat World Cup slalom like the Volkl P60: 115-62-98mm, with an 8.2 meter radius.

On skis like this, today’s racers — Bode Miller, Hermann Maier, Benni Raich and the Kostelic kids– can bend space-time. Hell, so can you and I.

That’s a revelation.

A radical early experiment

In the winter of 1948-49, DU racer Jerry Hiatt, who worked in Thor Groswold’s shipping department, got together with high schooler Jerry Groswold and proposed making a turnier slalom ski. They took a pair of the laminated hickory Rocket model – a very flexible ski to begin with – and carved it down to about a 52mm waist, leaving the tip and tail alone. This gave them roughly a 15mm sidecut, twice the normal depth. “We put the edges back on, and went up to Winter Park to try them out,” Groswold remembers. “They turned sensationally but wouldn’t stop turning. We got one long round turn, and a step turn, and another long round turn. We each made one run and went back to the factory and threw the skis in a corner. They probably became firewood. It never occurred to us to keep the waist at 70mm and make the tip and tail a lot wider, as is done today.” This oversight was a natural one, considering that Groswold bought hickory lumber in 4-inch widths. To make the tip wider than 100mm would have required some fancy gluing. Moreover, when they made their skis so narrow at the waist, the two Jerries also made them very soft in flex through the middle, giving them a severe case of double camber. The solution would have been to make the middle of the ski thicker, not wider.

Copyright 2005 by Seth Masia

The first “safety” bindings, by Portland skier Hjalmar Hvam, weren’t all that safe. But 50 years ago, Cubco, Miller, Look and Marker began to change skiing’s broken leg image.

By Seth Masia

(First published in Skiing History, September 2002)

By the mid-Thirties, half of the great inventions of alpine skiing were already in place. The standard waisted and cambered shape for a turning ski had been established 80 years earlier by Sondre Norheim. Rudolph Lettner had introduced the steel edge in 1928, and the first laminated skis – with ash tops and hard bases of hickory or even Bakelite plastic – were produced in 1932. The Eriksen toe iron and Kandahar heel cable assured a solid connection of boot to ski.

Too solid. Every racer could count on breaking a leg from time to time, and some of the classic European downhills hospitalized up to a third of the entry list. Around 1937 a small company in Megeve, Reussner-Beckert, introduced a primitive adjustalble-release toe iron. The Ski Club of Great Britain liked it enough to offer a 25 pound prize for the best "safety" binding produced in the coming year. The winning entry, from one P. Schwarze of St. Gallen, Switzerland, provided that if the boot sprang free of the heel cable, the toe would also release -- but upward, not laterally. 

Some of the brighter lights in the skiing community experimented with homemade release systems. One of these brighter lights – and one of the injured racers – was an elegantly tall, slim athlete named Hjalmar Hvam. Like Mikkel Hemmestveit and countless Norwegians before him, Hvam was a great Nordic champion who emigrated to the U.S. Born in Kongsberg in 1902, Hvam won his first jumping contest at age 12, and won consistently through his teens. But he jumped in the shadow of the local Ruud brothers – Birger, Sigmund and Asbjorn – who snapped up all of the Kongsberg team slots at the annual Holmenkollen classic.

Hvam quit skiing and emigrated to Canada in 1923, arriving in Portland in 1927. He worked as a laborer in a lumber mill until joining the Cascade Ski Club in 1929. He was quickly recognized as a leading jumper, cross-country racer and speed skater, peaking at the national championships in 1932 at Lake Tahoe, where he won both the jumping and cross-country events to take the Nordic combined championship. Coaxed onto alpine skis, he won both runs of his very first slalom race, in 1933 – the Oregon state championships. On borrowed skis.

That experience led to twelve consecutive downhill victories in 1935 and 1936, including the Silver Skis on Mt. Rainier and the first running of the Golden Rose race on Mt. Hood. On Mt. Baker, in 1936, he won a four-way competition with victories in all four disciplines – jumping, cross-country, slalom and downhill. He qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team that year, but couldn’t compete because he was still a citizen of Norway.

In 1935, he opened the Hjalmar Hvam Ski Shop in Northwest Portland, with a branch at Mt. Hood. The city shop had a great location, right on the 23rd St. trolley line from downtown. Hvam saw firsthand the dozens of injuries suffered by his customers, as well as by competing racers. No one kept national records, but it appears that the injury rate was horrendous. Ski injury experts like Dr. Jasper Shealy and Carl Ettlinger estimate that in the years just before and after World War II, about 1 percent of skiers suffered an injury on any given day – so it’s likely that by season’s end, 10 percent of all skiers were out of commission. About half of these injuries were probably lower-leg fractures. The most visible après-ski accessories were plaster casts and crutches. It wasn’t a recipe for long-term commercial success.

Trained as a mechanical drafstman, Hvam began tinkering with toe irons, looking for a reliable way to release the boot in a fall. The problem then, as now, was how to make a sophisticated latch that would hold a skier in for normal skiing maneuvers – steering, edging, jumping, landing – but release in abnormal or complex falls. It was a puzzle.

Injury Leads to Invention

Hvam’s “Eureka!” moment came under the influence of a powerful anaesthetic. In June 1937, Hvam won the Golden Rose on Mt. Hood – again – and then climbed with some friends to do a little cornice jumping. The result was predictable: In the spring snow, someone was bound to punch through the crust and break a leg. This time, it was Hvam, and he sustained a spiral fracture. He was sent to Portland’s St. Vincent Hospital for surgery. “When I came out of the ether I called the nurse for a pencil and paper,” he wrote decades later. “I had awakened with the complete principle of a release toe iron.”

What he imagined looked like a simple pivoting clip notched into the boot’s sole flange. An internal mechanism held the pivot centered as long as the boot toe pressed upward against the clip. But when that pressure was removed, as in a severe forward lean, the clip was freed to swing sideways. Thus Hvam provided for sideways toe release in a forward-leaning, twisting fall.
In 1939, Hvam broke the leg again, this time while testing his own binding. He always claimed the leg had never healed properly, but it did teach the lesson that “safety” bindings aren’t always safe. Nonetheless, Hvam launched his Saf-Ski binding into the market. His release toe was received with enthusiasm by his racing and jumping friends. Jumpers used it by inserting a heel lift under the boot, thus jamming the toe iron so it couldn’t swivel. It seemed a pointless exercise, but professional jumpers from the Northwest wanted to support their friend.

Many racers viewed the idea of a release toe with intense suspicion, especially after Olaf Rodegaard released from his Hvam binding in a giant slalom. Rodegaard, however, was convinced that the release saved his leg, and kept the binding. Hvam sold a few dozen pairs before World War II broke out, and tried to talk the Pentagon into buying the toe for the 10th Mountain Division – but the troops shipped out before he could close a deal. At least three pairs of Saf-Ski toe irons went to Italy with the division, bootlegged by Rodegaard and by the Idaho brothers Leon and Don Goodman (the Goodmans would introduce their own release binding in 1952). Thus the first production release bindings found their way to Europe, screwed solidly to GI Northland and Groswold skis.

After the war, Hvam produced the binding in several versions for retail sale and rental. It was widely accepted by his buddies in the jumping and racing communities, at least in the West. He sold 2,500 pairs in 1946-47, and watched as a dozen North American companies rapidly imitated the principle. His new competitors included Anderson & Thompson, Dovre, Northland, Gresvig, Krystal , U.S. Star and O-U.

Euros Develop Release Systems

There were also European inventions. In 1948, in Nevers, France, sporting goods manufacturer Jean Beyl built a plate binding mortised into the ski. There’s no evidence that Beyl was inspired by American toe irons, and his binding was based on a completely different principle. It didn’t release the boot in a fall – instead, it swiveled to protect the lower leg against twist, without actually detaching from the ski. It did something no other binding could do: It would absorb momentary shock and return to center. The binding’s lateral elasticity was a revolutionary idea and it wouldn’t be duplicated by other manufacturers for another two decades. The plate also eliminated the flexible leather ski boot sole from the release mechanism, vastly improving reliability. Beyl wanted to give the product an American-sounding name, and settled on the title of a glossy weekly picture magazine published in New York. By 1950 Beyl had talked several members of the French team into using his Look plate, including world champions Henri Oreiller and James Couttet.

Norm Macleod, one of the partners in the U.S. importing firm Beconta, recalls that the problems with the Look plate were weight and thickness. To install the binding, a mechanic had to carve a long, deep hole in the top of the ski. “The plate was mortised into the top of the ski and therefore the ski had to be thick,” Macleod says. “It was set about a centimeter into the ski, and stuck up another 6 or 7 millimeters above the top surface. There was resistance to that. Racers thought it was advantageous to be closer to the ski.”

So in 1950 Beyl created the Look Nevada toe, the first recognizably modern binding design, with a long spring-loaded piston to provide plenty of lateral elasticity for shock absorption. Beyl was a perfectionist; in an era when most bindings were made of stamped steel, his Nevada was made of expensive, heavy cast aluminum. It was nearly bulletproof. It was a two-pivot toe unit-that is, the main pivoting body carried along a second pivot on which was mounted the toe cup, thus assuring that the toe cup would travel in parallel with the boot toe.

Hannes Marker, a native of Berlin who had learned to ski as a Wehrmacht soldier stationed in Norway, went to Garmisch after the war and found a job as a civilian ski instructor for the U.S. Army recreational center, where Leon Goodman was supervisor of the ski school. There he saw the American-made release toes, and thought “I can do better.” In 1952 he introduced his Duplex toe, a two-piece toe that gripped the corners of the boot toe flange in much the same way future pincer bindings would work. He followed this, in 1953, with the Simplex. Like the Look toe, and unlike the Hvam, it was adjustable for release tension, and was the first release toe to be widely accepted by racers outside France. And like the Look Nevada, the Simplex was a double-pivot system.

Cubberley Attacks Heel Release

Other tinkerers were hard at work. Beginning in 1948, in Nutley, N.J., mechanical engineer and recreational skier Mitch Cubberley brought an ingenious mind to the problem of skiing’s broken-leg image. Skiing with his friend Joe Powers at Highmount, Belleayre and Bromley, Cubberley concluded that a key problem – thus far addressed by no one – was unreliable heel release, arising from the combination of the soft leather boot sole, the longthong wrap used to reinforce the sloppy leather boot cuff, and the complex, serpentine Kandahar heel cable. He figured out how to eliminate the heel cable and its grip on the soft leather sole, designing an elegant spring-controlled latch which could be mounted at both toe and heel.

A key element of the Cubberley design was the boot plate. Steel plates were screwed solidly to the toe and heel of the boot, and the spring-loaded binding gripped these plates rather than a soft, wet, flexible boot sole. The metal-to-metal contact provided more consistent release and reduced boot-to-ski friction. Cubberley sold about 200 sets during the winter of 1949-50. In Orem, Utah, Earl Miller was on a parallel track, and a bitter rivalry grew between the two men.

In Annecy, France, Georges Salomon, manufacturer of steel ski edges and cable heel bindings, produced his own release toe, the Skade, to sell with his popular Lift cable heel. It was neither a single-pivot design, like the Look, nor a two-pivot toe, like the Marker, but instead used a pair of roller bearings, riding on a steel cam, to guide the toe cup in its lateral travel. It was a less elegant system, but it worked, and Salomon signed up a roster of ski racers to endorse it. The basic design, beefed up with more substantial castings, eventually produced the best-selling S.444 and S.555 bindings.

In 1952, Mitch Cubberley patented a toe unit that would release in all directions, and sales took off. By 1955 he’d added a lip to his heel latch and created the first step-in heel. Earl Miller dubbed his own binding the Hanson. He spent several winters promoting the binding by throwing himself into terrifying tumbles to demonstrate its release.

Back in Portland, Hvam kept cranking out a few thousand pairs of Saf-Ski toes each year. In 1952, at age 50, he coached the U.S. Nordic Combined team at Holmenkollen – and found he could still outjump most of his young athletes. His ad agency created the slogan “Hvoom with Hvam – and have no fear!” Magazine ads featured a photo of Hvam soaring through a gelandesprung jump, accompanied by a chatty text in which Hvam explained, in Norwegian-English syntax, how his binding worked. “Maybe you do not know about release bindings,” read one ad. “Maybe you are in a hospital with a broken leg. . . . Let me tell you about how the Hvam toe release works. It never releases while you ski, because this part has two rounded pins that fit into sockets and it cannot swivel because this part is pushed upwards. As long as it pushes up, it cannot swivel. When you ski, your boot sole always pushes up on the toe release lip. The harder you edge, the harder your toe is locked in place. Now. When you fall bad, your foot may twist. Your foot twists sideways, there is not much pressure up. The toe swivels, and your boot may be twisted out without injury. Maybe you think I would tell you a lie. If you think so, I am sorry for you. I would not lie about anything. Especially I would not lie about skiing, because skiing is what my whole life is about.”

By 1953, with the widespread adoption of “safety” bindings, it became disconcertingly clear that the injury rate wasn’t improving. The Stowe ski patrol reported that they were still transporting about four leg fractures per 1000 skier days, and placed the blame on the fact that there was no standard method of adjusting and testing release bindings. In France, in 1954, Jean Beyl offered a $71 indemnity for any broken leg suffered using a factory-mounted Look-and paid out only twice based on 1,180 skiers. Ski Magazine estimated that this amounted to an injury rate of .17 per 1,000 skier days-which presumably meant you’d be 24 times safer skiing on a properly adjusted Look than on the average New Englander’s recreational rig. Earl Miller responded the following winter by offering his own $100 bounty for broken legs suffered on Hanson bindings mounted in his own Provo shop.

Release Toes Proliferate

By the late 1950s, American ski shops were selling release toes under some 35 brand names, including A&T, ABC, Alta, Aspen, Attenhofer, Cervin, Cober, Cubco, Cortina, Dovre, Eckel, Evernew, Geze, Gresvig, Goodman, Gripon, Kenny K, Krystal, Look, Marker, Meergans, Miller, Northland, O-U, P&M, Persenico, Ramy, Ski-Flete, Ski Free, Spearhead, Stowe Flexible, Suwe, Top, Tyrolia, U.S. Star and Werner. Hvam kept his prices low – in 1961, when the Look Nevada toe sold for $12.50, Hvam’s Standard model, in chrome, retailed for $6.95 (though there was a Deluxe model, in gold, for $12.50). Hvam introduced his heel release cable for $4.50, when the Look cable sold for $7.50.

Other than Cubco and Miller, no one else had yet figured out how to eliminate the heel cable, essentially unchanged from Reuge’s 1932 Kandahar design. Because cable heels were generic, it was common to see mixed systems: You could mount a Hvam toe with a Salomon Lift cable, or a Look toe with a Marker turntable. As late as 1965, Marker was still selling a non-release sidethrow turntable heel. At this point, Look introduced the releaseable Grand Prix heel, based on the same high-elasticity principle as the Nevada toe unit.

Hvam’s binding was already obsolete, and while Cubco’s system worked efficiently, it was viewed with disdain by experts, who distrusted upward toe release.

In 1961, rivals Earl Miller and Mitch Cubberley introduced the first ski brakes, eliminating the “safety” strap and with it cuts and contusions due to windmilling skis. Ski resorts wouldn’t accept ski brakes until the major European binding brands adopted them beginning in 1976.

On the racing side, momentum was moving steadily in favor of the European factories, which had access to the top racers. Stein Eriksen, for instance, endorsed Marker, and in 1960 Jean Vuarnet and Roger Staub won gold medals at the Squaw Valley Olympics using the Look Nevada I toe. Look got another promotional boost when Karl Schranz and Egon Zimmermann switched from Marker.

Rocket science

The ski binding market was about to change. In 1961, a real rocket scientist named Robert Lusser ruptured his achilles tendon while testing his own cable bindings in his hotel room at Saas-Fee. A champion aerobatic pilot and designer of Klemm light aircraft, Lusser went on to design German fighters for Messerschmitt and Heinkel during WWII. At Heinkel he was responsible for the first jet fighter that ever flew, and had created the Fieseler V-1 “buzz bomb.” The U.S. Navy grabbed him in 1948 to work on early cruise missiles at Point Mugu, California, and he did some work for Wernher von Braun on the Redstone missile project, before returning to Germany, and Messerschmitt, in 1957.

Lusser did a thorough engineering analysis of the binding release problem, and came up with three key innovations: A teflon anti-friction pad under the boot toe, a heel release system based on a heel cup, a cam and a fixed-tension spring, and a simple toe unit that gripped the upper radius of the boot toe instead of the toe flange. This last innovation provided a long high-elasticity stroke before release, which meant that the binding could return to center without releasing — even at relatively low spring tension settings. It was an ugly toe, built like a Cubco spring turned sideways and linked to a couple of steel-wire boot-grippers. But it worked.

Lusser patented these inventions, and the major binding companies picked up his innovations. At Look, Jean Beyl redesigned the two-pivot Nevada toe. The result, in 1962, was the ingenious single-pivot Look Nevada II, with its long toe wings that gripped the boot’s upper toe, rather than the sole flange. This patented design remained the basis of Look toe units for the next 40 years.

In 1963 Lusser quit his job at Messerschmitt and launched the Lusser binding company. He died in 1969, and the brand died with him. But he had started the ball rolling on his three key breakthroughs.

During the Sixties, Mitch Cubberley and Gordon Lipe proved the importance of reducing boot-ski friction, and, in parallel with Lusser, created the first anti-friction devices. Personal injury attorneys began paying closer attention to ski binding design. Cubberley had the test results to prove that removing the leather boot sole from the release system improved safety, and by the mid-Sixties Cubco was selling more than 200,000 sets of bindings annually. Cubco was the binding of choice for rental operators.

With his dated design, Hvam had a problem. In 1966, his insurers wanted a $160,000 liability premium. He would have had to sell nearly 120,000 sets of toes just to pay for insurance, and he had nowhere near that kind of market share.

Standardized Sole

Technology was advancing on other fronts. Look had introduced the Nevada II toe, following Lusser’s idea of gripping the upper radius of the boot toe. The company aggressively, and correctly, promoted the value of high elasticity and shock absorption, and the message got through. As racers talked about “Markering out” of the Simplex, European factories redesigned their toes for longer travel, producing products like the Marker M4 and Geze Jet Set on Lusser’s patents.

In 1967 Tyrolia introduced the Clix Rocket step-in heel unit, and Salomon responded with a heel unit that could be cocked open for step-in by closing its cover latch. By 1970, Kurt von Besser, Rudi Gertsch and Dr. Richard Spademan introduced new variations on the plate binding, just as plastic boots offered the promise of a standardized boot sole, which would eliminate the need for notched toes and screwed-on steel plates. It was clear that to stay competitive, a ski binding company needed deep pockets for research and testing.

On the commercial side, the big European factories found sizeable American corporations to distribute their products in North America. Beconta commanded almost 30 percent of the market for Look, while Garcia Corp. – distributor of Fischer and Rossignol – hawked Marker even more successfully. Salomon found a home at A&T. Tyrolia was purchased by AMF. Tiny independent companies like Hvam, Cubco and Miller began to look irrelevant in the great merchandising wars. Even smaller start-ups – Americana, Moog, Allsop – muddied the waters and cut into market share.

Saf-Ski R.I.P.

In 1972, Hvam retired and the Saf-Ski binding disappeared for good. Hvam died in 1996 at the age of 93. Hvam never fully solved the problem of pre-release, or heel release, or boot sole flex, but he defined the issues and led the way.

Cubco, armed with brilliant reviews from the testing labs, soldiered on. Mitch Cubberley was determined to build a safe, effective and cheap binding, and seemed equally determined to keep it ugly. With the universal adoption of standard plastic boot soles, his binding lost its performance advantage. Thanks largely to his own efforts in partnership with Gordon Lipe to eliminate boot-to-ski friction, industry-wide injury rates fell 75 percent to about 2.5 sled rides per thousand skier days, and most of those injuries were upper-body fractures entirely unrelated to ski binding issues.

Moreover, Cubberley was amazingly generous about his own designs. When other companies infringed on his patents-the original Gertsch plate and the Rosemount toe unit are egregious examples-he declined to protect his rights. Cubco, a victim of its own technological leadership, slid into commercial obscurity.

Cubberley, more than anyone the man responsible for destroying the sport’s broken-leg image in North America, died in 1977 at age 62. Cubco folded two years later. But the truth is, if you have a late-model Cubco binding, complete with its standard Lipe Slider, it still works pretty well.

By 1976, when Look’s single-pivot patent expired, Salomon was ready to adopt its long-elasticity design with the first of the 727-series bindings. Even so, the Look Nevada toe of the era featured almost twice the elastic travel of the 727, or of any other toe unit available at the time.

Thanks largely to the work of Jean Beyl, Robert Lusser, Mitch Cubberley and Gordon Lipe, today’s bindings – with long-elasticity toe and heel units, anti-friction devices, and standardized boot soles – have reduced lower leg injuries to an insignificant level, while largely eliminating pre-release. The complex issue of knee injuries is another matter, which we may well revisit in these pages in years to come – if new binding designs succcessfully address it, and new pioneers step up to the plate. 

Photos: Top of page, Cubco step-in; middle of page, Robert Lusser's low-friction, high-elasticity ski binding.

At first a gimmicky convenience, the boot buckle took ten years to earn its place among the sport’s enduring inventions.

In 1955 a former stunt pilot and Swiss inventor named Hans Martin sold the world’s leading ski boot company, Henke, his patent for using metal buckles rather than laces to fasten leather boots.

Dolomite double lace boots (Vintage Ski World photo)

Skiers needed such a convenience. The number of lacing hooks and eyelets on a pair of boots had skyrocketed to as many as 90 with the introduction around 1950 of the inner boot and rear lacing. The digitally challenged skier could now spend as long as 10 minutes lacing the equivalent of four boots before setting out on the slopes, to say nothing of fine-tuned re-lacing adjustments during the day. Time wasn’t the only inconvenience. Tightening the laces of the hard, stiff outer boot, unless you used a hook-like device to draw them taut, caused raw, sore fingers. And pity the racer who attempted to adjust his laces on a raw frigid January day before stepping into the starting gate. It was an experience comparable to that possibly felt by Scott penciling his dying thoughts in Antarctica.

The buckle boot surely would be the answer. “No more frozen fingers!” claimed Henke. “Flip it open. . .flip it shut. Keep your gloves on!” But when Henke’s salesmen began to show their $49.50 Speedfit boot to dealers in the 1955, they were often laughed out of the shops. At the time buckles were associated with the galoshes worn by folks to walk through slushy streets. “Who would want to wear galoshes to ski?” sneered skeptical shop owners.

Henke Speedfit

Nor did skiers invade shops demanding the revolutionary lace-less boot. They were reluctant to give up lacing’s comfortable close fit, especially when the hard outer boot contained a soft separately laced inner boot. The infinite adjustability offered skiers the most personalized fit they would enjoy until the arrival of custom-foamed liners 20 years later. By contrast, buckles created stresses and painful pressure points on the foot where they attached to the leather.

Racers — usually the first to seize on new technology — didn’t begin to adopt the buckle boot until the early 1960s when other bootmakers improved on Martin’s original design, and offered hand-lasted inners and better-designed tongues to even out the pressure.  Even then, a top racer would wear out a boot in a few weeks as the leather stretched beyond repair. What the performance-oriented skier awaited was leather’s replacement by indestructible, stiffer plastic. In Dubuque, Iowa, plastic boot inventor Bob Lange made his early prototypes using laces, but it was almost humanly impossible to cinch tight the hard, unpliable plastic. Only buckles, Lange discovered in 1965, would enable his new boot to work. Fortunately for him, the buckle had already been invented. . . and the design and making of ski boots changed forever.

Heinz Herzog, long-time president of Raichle-Molitor USA, adds this comment:

It was not uncommon to suffer frostbite as a result of wearing seamed leather boots without interior padding or insulation. To cinch a long thong around the boot, I remember having to thread it through a couple of steel rings with bare fingers. Hans Martin, a Swiss, invented the buckle. Part of his patent covered the method of mounting each buckle on the boot, a challenge because it was leather. Need to spread pressure, not create pressure points. Martin sold the patent to the Swiss boot company, Henke. Others tried to design their own, but Martin’s design was the only one that worked, so the other boot companies like Molitor paid Henke for the right to use the Martin-designed buckle. Le Trappeur had the greatest success in racing. Instead of having the two buckles going laterally across the shaft, they attached one diagonally at the heel.

Martin spent tens of thousands trying to make a one-buckle boot.