Revolutionizing Ski Industry New Boards Could Make Average Skiers Experts

There’s a breakthrough in skiing - one that figures to at least shorten one’s stay at the intermediate level.

Ready for this? Skiing has its oversized Prince racquet, its magic new golf club. But the jury is still out as to its overall effect on the sport.

Parabolic-shaped, hourglass, or super-sidecut skis (marketers haven’t settled on a generic name) have undoubtedly changed skiing significantly enough in just a year to be called a revolution.

Experts throw away their poles and add to their precision carving the freedom of a snowboarder.

Intermediates overnight move off that plateau they’ve been on all those years, and suddenly feel the difference between a true carved turn and a turn skidded out at the end.

The difference is much more control in steeper ungroomed terrain than some ever thought possible. Back on groomed boulevards, you suddenly have power steering in your turns.

As for beginners, it is not just learn-in-a-day skiing. It is learning to make one’s first turns with a sense of very quick control over the skis, and thus almost none of the weight-back-bailout panic that has terrorized the novice. A revolution indeed.

But the question remains, will these new (and expensive) goodies bring hordes of new skiers into the sport, or hordes of ski retirees back in? Can the sudden ease of skiing, created by an equipment breakthrough, change the numbers significantly?

Certainly American Skiing Co. is pinning many hopes on the super-sidecut revolution. Parent Sunday River has always been a leader in early skier development, and so the new skis were a natural for an outfit that has always touted the learn-in-a-day approach to novice skiing.

But will revolutionary skis have a revolutionary effect on skiing?

There are some doubts. The current craze in golfing has not been created by the sport’s getting suddenly easy. People who go bonkers over golf love their growing skill and mastery over its toughness, continually dreaming and fantasizing about moving up to the next level.

Skiing has always been that way. Herbert Schneider recalls that, as he and his father, Hannes, were establishing the famous ski school at Mt. Cranmore, they would see the same skiers return year after year for instruction as they inched their way up the ladder of mastery over what was also once a very tough sport in which to excel.

It would take at least six years in ski school, Herbert said of those leather-boots-and-long-wooden-skis days, for a rank novice to become a solid intermediate.

A truly accomplished skier was a spectacle on the slopes. People would stop to watch him pass, amazed at the seeming effortlessness and grace of his turns. And most would ski on dreaming.

These days, skiers work their way quickly from novice to shaky intermediate to solid intermediate to terminal intermediate. Few work their way off that intermediate plateau that is marked by an inability to shift gears from easy to tough terrain and/or surface conditions.

Will a new generation of shaped skis that makes the sport even easier be a boon to skiing?

If they only make the easy easier, that will never fulfill the quest that has drawn people to skiing.