Messing With Ski Shapes, Part Three

In case you thought the Fédération Internationale de Ski wasn’t crazy enough remanding ski shapes back to the 1980s, here they came a couple of weeks ago to tell Tina Maze that her underwear is too fast.

Messing With Ski Shapes, Part Two

The battle continues over new ski shapes dictated for 2013 by the International Ski Federation.

The debate blows hot on the slopes and in the blogosphere. (Although we haven’t heard lately from American giant slalom specialist Ted Ligety, who protested early in the season that the FIS was attempting to “ruin” his sport.)

Turning Back the Skiing Clock

My mother says she doesn’t always “get” the things I write about skiing. Full disclosure, Mom: Look out! This one’s about sidecut and turn radius, and what some World Cup skiers – most notably outspoken Americans Ted Ligety and Bode Miller – see as an attempt to send ski racing back to the Hickory Age.

Build a bank and lean against it

The snowboardcross racers in Telluride for the World Cup this weekend will try to stay upright over the jack-in-the-box table-tops and tricky rollers peppering the course. And they will lay out horizontal to the plane of the earth as they whip around giant, fun-park hairpins. That’s the part of the course I’d like to experience, the high tea-cup walls where, like a swirling liquid, I’d be pinned by an alternate gravity to the smooth curved sides.