Yet in the USA race skis are like rare flowers that bloom only once a year – on a fall “Race Night” at your local specialty shop, usually aimed at the adolescent competitor – then lie dormant. Even America’s premier ski maker, K2, who once sponsored World Cup champions like the fabled Mahre twins, dropped racing completely shortly after providing a young Bode Miller with his first shaped skis.  The brand proceeded to ascend to the number one sales position in the U.S., so it’s absence from the race community didn’t seem to have any negative effects. 

The shunning of race skis in this great land of ours is a crime so commonplace it passes unnoticed. Fortunately, it’s correctable, and the solution lies behind the eyeballs reading this sentence. Ask for these skis.   Better yet, demand them.  Better still, order them.  If you want to experience the best skis made, you have to raise your hand and place your bid.

When America rediscovers race skis, what they’ll find is a multi-tiered matrix of models headlined by the honest-to-God, FIS-blessed competition skis that are of limited availability and rightly so.  One step to the side are competition-grade skis that don’t conform to current FIS rules (or to anyone’s idea of an off-piste ski) and require Level 10 talent to manage.

While we usually end up with a couple of these thoroughbreds in our corral, most of the non-FIS race skis we examine here are known in the vernacular as “citizen race” or “beer league” skis.  They deploy all the technology found in World Cup start houses, but add a little more shape and thin the profile or otherwise dial down the stiffness so people who don’t train incessantly can bend them. Although these are all competition-quality skis, each with a technological edge that’s supposedly just an teensy bit better than the other guys’ gizmos, when skied side-by-side they’re much more alike than they are different. 

Our field is made up of roughly equal parts of slalom and giant slalom models, yet our panel routinely awards SL models its highest scores. This is mostly attributable to sidecut: it’s easier to let a SL ski make a long turn than to wrest a short turn out of a GS.  That said, there’s nothing like putting all thoughts of short turns aside and barreling downhill on a ski that’s so stable, 60mph feels like 35.

Because this field prizes power and precision above all attributes, we’ve listed our Recommended models according to their Power ranking, just as we did last year. 

All these skis are excellent, so distinctions among them aren’t about quality, but nuances in behavior.

Unlike our examination of other categories, we’re not trying to identify the “best” Non-FIS Race ski, as every last one of them is great. Instead, we’re trying to describe the nuances in behavior that make some more demanding of the pilot and others more amenable to freeskiing. We realize that our observations play no part in any committed racer’s choice of model, as these decisions are determined by the athletes, their coaches and the suppliers who equip them. Our intent is to inform the civilian community who is more likely to free-ski these models than race them.

Our examination of the NFR field is not comprehensive. Dynastar, Fischer and Salomon models were MIA in 2019 for a variety of reasons. We’ll re-double our efforts to cover them next year. 

Head has dropped from view in our round-up because they updated all their race fleet with Energy Management Circuit (EMC), obsoleting their 2019/20 reviews. No commentary of the Non-FIS Race category is complete without a mention of a brand that has nurtured this genre, well, forever. The new Worldcup Rebels e-Speed Pro and e-Race Pro are bound to be mind-boggling. I got a taste of the e-Speed Pro on a test run at Mammoth last February (before the pandemic axe fell) and it was breath-taking in its precision and gluttonous lust for speed.

What makes this shortfall in data collection particularly vexing is that every model we were able to essay we adored. This isn’t pandering – this category is reasonably pander-proof – but a reflection of the fact that race ski technology represents each brand’s best effort.  Peripheral considerations such as Off-Piste Performance pale in comparison to a single determinant of excellence: the clock.

The battle to make the best race skis never calls a ceasefire. Just because the ski in the catalog doesn’t change from one year to the next doesn’t mean the R&D department has hit the snooze button. It doesn’t make sense to re-tool every year for a market as slow-moving as the citizen race category, but reputations are built on innovation so it’s important to introduce fresh blood into the racing mainstream every few years.

In 2020, the brands who refreshed their NFR collection were Atomic and Blizzard, in both cases to stunning effect. Two years ago, Völkl tweaked its Racetigers but we didn’t get on them until last spring, so they were new to us. In a word, wow. The Völkl Racetiger SL had the biggest performance envelope of any ski we examined, making it the best free-skier of the lot, in our testers’ estimation.

Some of the models we essayed are awfully close to the real deal, but there is still a wide gulf between the most aggro Non-FIS Race model and actual World Cup race machines. To challenge this supposition, I inserted one true, FIS GS, which happened to be a Stöckli Laser WRT GS FIS, into our mix.  Compared to the Non-FIS field, they were practically unskiable. Within a few yards after pushing off, the skis inform their passenger that they’re heading for the finish line whether you care to come along or not. If you lack accuracy, timing, commitment and most of all, strength, you will not be in charge of coming events.

While race-room technologies continue to creep ahead every season, a couple of timeless verities remain true year in and year out. Truism number one is that there are more similarities among Non-FIS Race skis than differences. Truism two would beg to differ, noting that there are two clear sub-sets within the genre: skis that behave exactly like real, FIS-approved, race skis that beg to be skied with tireless aggression, and those that just want to have fun. Truism number three is that no matter if you’re on a slalom or a GS, you’ll have some of the most exhilarating runs of your life on a Non-FIS Race model.

As befits models built for speed, not for comfort, our Recommended models are presented here in order of their Power scores.  To maintain consistency with the rest of the 2021 presentation, we’ve erased all scores, but they can still be viewed in the 2020 season archives in the Realskiers.com members’ site.