Revelations

Swimming Against the Tide “You must know, deep inside, that what you are doing is important, meaningful – vital. That someone somewhere needs it to be special, that you have thought about them, and that you care.” – Master Carpenter Callum Robinson, author of Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, as quoted in Touch Wood, featured in The New Yorker, December 9, 2024. I conducted my first ski tests during the winter of 1986/87 when I was a product manager at Salomon. The intentions of Salomon management were twofold: to take a snapshot of what the ski market looked like at the time, and …Continue Reading	Catching Up It’s been a rough first half of the ski season. The 24/25 season began with a whimper, not a bang, when most major ski brands belatedly realized their sales targets were unattainable. Unsold skis were clogging the supplier-to-retailer pipeline; even shiny new models with technology worth talking about couldn’t maintain the sales momentum of the post-pandemic market. Over the course of the past few months, the wholesale backlog has been shifted from the supplier community to its constituent retailers, with an unhealthy slice off-loaded to online mega-stores. Oversupply inevitably leads to price concessions, a boon to budget-squeezed skiers seeking the …Continue Reading	Battered, Bloody but Unbowed To describe skiers as a resilient lot wouldn’t be wrong, just woefully insufficient. Skiers are determined to ski no matter how many battles with gravity they have lost. Many have been brutally mauled, patched back together and hustled back into the fray while their most recent wounds are still healing. Take a good look at the x-ray decorating this page. Supplementing the efforts of what was once a normal human spinal column is a spiral staircase of what appear to be 4-inch wood screws. As repairs go, it’s not what one would consider subtle or sophisticated. It belongs, of course, …Continue Reading
A Fly in the Ointment Today’s Revelation has been several weeks in the making. In the course of researching it, I’ve unearthed several disturbing trends that are tearing at the fabric of our sport: Some equipment suppliers are recklessly jamming their over-production into the market, providing more leverage for some of the retail sector’s worst actors. Skier visits are still strong (where there is snow), but so is skier discontent. Is the sport at risk of decline due to a surfeit of success? Is the resort experience getting better or worse? Vail Resorts is showing some chinks in its armor – sales of its Epic …Continue Reading	At Our Wit’s End: A Sucker’s Guide to Revenue Sharing Models *By “Special Offer,” we mean “Obsequious Solicitation.” It’s not like we haven’t tried. In our tireless efforts to increase our gross receipts, we’ve resorted to double-billing, even triple-billing, but our over-educated readership must employ a small army of highly trained accountants to heartlessly snuff out this nearly legal initiative. (If you would like to avoid the menace of multiple billing and its associated surcharges, we have an insurance plan just for this almost certain eventuality. For details, see below, in the space provided after the last paragraph.) To bolster our resume, we’ve declared ourselves the uncontested winner of prestigious awards …Continue Reading	Bloomberg is Bankrupt If Bloomberg Business doled out financial advice as transparently idiotic and unresearched as its ski gear advice, Bloomberg – and all its clients- would be bankrupt. Dear Readers: The following bit of tripe was recently re-published by Apple News after first appearing in the pages of Bloomberg’s online publication. It consists of unreadable drivel from end to end, and certainly isn’t worth paying to peek behind the Apple News paywall to investigate, so I’ve copied the text, verbatim, in this week’s Revelation, and I’ll also recite it as we visit its few paltry paragraphs of twaddle in the companion podcast. My …Continue Reading
Suspended Animation Skiing isn’t for the faint of heart. Neither is subjecting oneself to what is coyly referred to as “America’s Health Care System.” Hold that thought while I elaborate on point one, that a lifetime devoted to skiing is hard to navigate without occasionally experiencing a consequential impact with the planet or some other immovable object attached to it. If you ski long enough, you will eventually learn the meaning of terms like “laminectomy” and “stenosis.” If you don’t know these terms yet, please bear with me while I bring you quickly up to speed with those who know them all …Continue Reading	There Will Never Be a Better Time to Buy Boots As far as I know, October isn’t “National Buy Your Ski Boots Now” Month, but it should be. Carryover stock will never be more abundant, and new models will still have a full range of sizes, which won’t be true forever. Perhaps most importantly, bootfitters are also in relatively strong supply, so with any luck the one waiting on you won’t be juggling three customers at once. It’s a perfect storm of abundance: values on last year’s models, selection on this year’s new arrivals and personalized service are all at their peak. The following ever-relevant Revelation was first published as …Continue Reading	AI Ski Reviews Revisited Since AI first reared its ugly head, I’ve been keenly observing its progress as a ski review creator (https://realskiers.com/revelations/chatgpt-ai-has-ski-patter-down-cold/) with a sense of impending doom. My second peek at its progress, The Con is On!, was one of the most read Revelations of last season, an indication that many of my Dear Readers share my curiosity about AI’s infiltration of our little world. Now that AI has had another season to sharpen its skills, I thought it might be illuminating to check in on its evolution. Here’s what I discovered. While AI remains a formidable mimic, and gets enough facts …Continue Reading
The Fog of War In the spring of 1970, I was finishing up my sophomore year at Yale. Not unlike the storms of protest that have swept through the halls of academia recently, the normal student pursuits of spring were shoved aside by a spike of anti-war protests that ground normal operations to a halt. Yale became a protest epicenter, not because of the Vietnam war and Yale’s role in sustaining the military-industrial complex, but because the murder trial of two prominent Black Panthers – Erica Huggins and Bobby Seale – was being held at the U.S. Courthouse in downtown New Haven. When Princeton …Continue Reading	Your Next Ski Should Be a Frontside Model I realize I’m swimming against the tide. The American skier has considered his abundant options and chosen some form of an All-Mountain model as his everyday ride. (Pardon me, ladies, much of what I’m about to assert doesn’t apply to you, as American women tend to coalesce around the low end of the “All-Mountain” spectrum.) No one with an above-average skill set should have any trouble navigating all manner of in-bounds conditions on one of today’s premier all-terrain models. Why nit-pick about a system that’s working just fine? I’ll tell you why. There are a couple of hidden traps in …Continue Reading	A Dearth of Data During my tenure as Editor of Realskiers.com, one of the benefits of membership has been a long-form ski review, accompanied by test scores complied by our small volunteer army of testers. Long-form reviews are still a principal component of the Realskiers’ membership bundle of benefits, but the data will no longer be a part of the presentation for the simple reason the paucity of entries results in data that is more detrimental than beneficial. Now for the not so simple reasons. The Realskiers Test Team has always been primarily comprised of shop personnel, from owners down to seasonal salespeople. Once …Continue Reading
The Reckoning to Come This isn’t the typical season-opening salvo from Realskiers.com that my Dear Readers and Dear Listeners have come to expect. In years past, I’ve kept the focus on emerging trends as exemplified by interesting new models and where they fit in the big picture. The intent has always been to celebrate excellence, acknowledge competence and remain silent about the also-rans. In the small world of alpine skiing, I didn’t want to become known as one of the “nattering nabobs of negativity,” as the immortal Spiro Agnew once characterized the press. But the sands beneath the ski trade’s foundations have shifted to …Continue Reading	Is Skiing Getting Better or Worse? As we grow older, events of the misty past take on a warm, pastel glow that suffuses our memories with a charm that seems notably lacking in the present. Part of our sanity- preservation wiring gives us the ability to edit our past so the best moments loom large and the soul-scarring bits are de-emphasized, if not suppressed in their entirety. While I refuse to wade into the fetid swamp that is the current state of discourse in our tragically divided society, there’s no denying it hasn’t helped lighten the national mood, regardless of where one lies on the political …Continue Reading	What My Murky Crystal Ball Reveals As I pen this piece in the middle of February, 2024, the outlines of the 2025 American ski market are coming into ever sharper focus. Every important brand has not only pitched its next collection to its retail partners, most initial orders have already been written, setting the stage for what should be a very consumer-friendly spring as far as ski sales are concerned. There are two key components that drive this looming shopping bonanza: the first, and most important, element is a slow-sales year that has a lot of the skis ordered preseason last year still on the shelves. …Continue Reading
The Lessons of P-165 Last week I outlined the backstory behind the creation of Tecnica’s Mach 1 collection, a fairly straightforward chronology of how a panel of bootfitters exerted a major influence on product development that continues to this day. The code name for the project is P-165, the Pantone color of the Tecnica’s best selling models of yore. Regular readers of this space know I can’t resist a teaching moment, so with your kind indulgence, permit me to pontificate on the lessons of P-165. What does the recent history of frontline bootfitter input into a brand’s R&D process inform us about the meaning …Continue Reading	Ski of the Year 2014 As a ski test editor for realskiers.com, I’m expected to name my Ski of the Year, the sure-fire, can’t-miss, only-an-idiot-wouldn’t-love-it best ski money can buy. Not wishing to disappoint my public, I have dutifully done so. But I did so in full awareness that the enterprise of picking a single ski that is somehow a cut above all the rest is part public service, part public disservice. Every ski review based on on-snow testing – the only kind worth entertaining at all – is a composite of several snapshot ski runs. If the testers are technically proficient and have years …Continue Reading