A Double Standard

The gulf between the world of alpine ski racing and the recreational ski market has never been wider or deeper. One manifestation of this disconnect is in the area of release/retention settings. Since the late 1970’s, there has been an industry-wide standard for how to determine any skier’s appropriate setting on a universal scale of release/retention values. Prior to the adoption of this method by the International Standards Organization (ISO), every binding manufacturer had their own proprietary scale and setting recommendations were on the fuzzy side: Marker advised skiers to set their bindings in the “Golden Zone,” and Salomon’s technical advice was served up in sermons from the Salomon Angel. But once the new standards went into effect, every skier on the hill, from the cautious beginner to the risk-taking expert, would have their bindings set at a number determined by his/her weight, height, age, boot sole length and skier type.

There remained but one problem to solve: skiers who were strong both physically and technically could walk right out of their correctly set bindings, as if they weren’t even there, which created its own, arguably more perilous situation for the competitor. Coaches can’t just stand by like neutral observers when their charges’ well-being is at obvious risk, so of course they crank up the bindings’ release values. The separation between a civilian’s set-up and a competitor’s kit begins at a relatively young age and only gets wider as the skier gets bigger and skis faster.

Once untethered to a standardized methodology, how does a coach or technician know how far to deviate from the norm? Jim Schaffner spent most of 40-year ski career involved with developing junior racers. His frustration with a clearly dysfunctional status quo inspired him to create his own binding setting chart based on his data, but whether grounded in a systematic approach or not, binding release settings for racers remain biased towards retention.

The ISO settings for the general skiing public are designed around the tibia’s resistance to twist and forward bending, so the binding will release well before the bone fails. The athlete-specific binding settings driven by performance on the race course are calculated to improve the competitor’s chance of skiing through a momentary crisis without triggering a release; if the higher settings contribute to effectively inhibiting release, it’s a risk most racers are willing to accept if it means they can’t release inadvertently.

Dr. Irv Scher is a biomechanical engineer who has been measuring and studying ski binding behavior since his post-graduate days as a research assistant to Professor Dan Mote at Cal-Berkeley. He’s now into his fifth, non-consecutive 2-year term as Chairman of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Committee F27 on Snow and Water Sports, a post he first ascended to in 2014. He has a thorough understanding of the science behind the ISO release/retention recommendations, and an acute awareness of their limitations.

“The ISO binding adjustment protocols deliberately prioritized the needs of the recreational skier, and in doing so achieved an 87% decrease in reported lower leg (tibia and fibula) fractures, which speaks to the effectiveness of the standard,” Scher observes. He admits that this leaves the competition sphere to sort out their special needs on their own, which is why the status quo sounds like a free-for-all compared to the precision of the ISO method. Yet when one considers the extremity of the conditions competitive racers (and freeskiers) routinely endure, the current “system” actually works quite well. But this begs the question, can we do better? I asked Dr. Scher if we’ve reached the limits of what present-day science can do, or might it be possible to expand the envelope of protection provided by a binding?

The answer is a qualified “yes, if…” – the biggest “if” being finding the massive funding required for any new technology to be industrialized. If we set this hurdle aside for a moment, there are several possible paths forward. The most obvious is to create binding technology specific to the needs of the race community. Scher and his assistants have spent a career doing research that used load cells between the skis and bindings, measuring all of the actual forces and torques both laterally at the toe and vertically at the heel. One of the unanticipated outcomes of the torque measurement analysis was that one can’t always predict the skier’s retention requirement based on the skier’s weight or sex, criteria instrumental in determining a skier’s setting on the ISO chart. While the recommended setting works for most skiers in most cases, the retention torques needed by aggressive, fast skiers on hard snow may be greater than those recommended by the ISO protocol … and sometimes they are not. Nonetheless, this data could be helpful in determining the design criteria for a competition-specific binding design, one sensitive to vertical and lateral loads, capable of interpreting the powerful vibrations that are generated at high speeds on hard surfaces.

The Electric Option is Unplugged

Data-hungry scientists like Dr. Scher would love to see an electric binding come to market that would enable the measurement of forces and torques that contribute to knee injuries. “By monitoring all vertical forces, both at the toe and heel, and lateral forces at the toe, we can estimate the combination of force and torque that puts the knee in danger and release the system when pre-set thresholds are reached. A true ACL injury inhibitor would be very hard for many, including ski area operators and ski patrollers to turn down,” muses Scher. “But what manufacturer has the will and the coin to make it?”

One could be forgiven for thinking that an electronic binding belongs in the same imaginary future as the flying car, given electronics noted aversions to all things cold and wet. But there have, in fact, been at least two electronic designs that made it as far as prototype development. “We had an electronic binding design we were willing to share with the other brands,” notes Dave Bertoni, who served as head of Salomon’s binding division in the 1990’s, “but that idea died in the cradle due to the typical internecine squabbling and an abandoned assault on the norms.”

Bertoni’s concluding remark referenced an uncomfortable fact about standardization in general: existing requirements may block certain innovations from ever being presented. For example, Bertoni references a Salomon prototype toe-piece design that released asymmetrically; established standards mandated symmetrical release values, effectively aborting the project.

When Outside the Norm is Normal

As I write this Revelation in April of 2026, the most horrific crash in recent memory ended the career of one of the greatest ski racers of all time, the fearless Lindsay Vonn. Yes, she was racing without one ACL, but it’s hard to see how this fact played any part in her accident or injury. It’s also hard to tell from the crash footage I’ve seen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHeSBWdreK8) if her bindings didn’t release in part because of Vonn’s body position relative to her feet, with one ski possibly blocking the other from moving laterally. Would her bindings have released had they been set according to the ISO standard? It’s a moot point, as there’s no way on God’s green earth Vonn would have stepped into a starting gate with a made-for-civilians set-up. Lyndsay Vonn raced to win, regardless of the sacrifices the ultimate goal required.

Vonn’s performance requirements and the trade-offs they entail have absolutely zero intersection with the needs and preferences of the recreational skier, male or female. But that doesn’t change the fact that a certain percentage of skilled skiers find it necessary to increase their release/retention settings in order to avoid inadvertent releases. Once skiers get accustomed to using higher settings of their own devising, it’s unlikely they’ll lower them as they grow older, as the ISO standard mandates.

If I’m comfortable making this unverifiable assertion it’s because I exemplify it. My recommended ISO setting is 6. I haven’t skied on a setting of 6 since, well, forever. I’ve been riding a 9 for the last several seasons. As long as I’m in confessional mode, I used to set my heels one number above my toe setting so my 130/140-flex boot would have a harder time prying itself loose from my heel. I’m an imperfect exemplar of an imperfect system.

My predilection for above-the-norm settings was forged in the crucible of the early freestyle era, when every run or aerial looked like a hare-brained experiment to test the boundaries of binding design. The alpine ski binding market then offered skiers many more design options than are available in today’s shriveled field; inventive competitors found a way to disarm every one of them.

For example, the whole concept of the Allsop binding system was a fixed point of rotation aligned with the skier’s tibia, which might have worked well except that the wily pros who adopted them would add a second post, essentially defeating the whole idea. The multi-axis Besser plate binding relied on a spring-loaded piston that fit into an indent on a platform that would work with any boot, an important consideration prior to the adoption of a standardized sole. The Besser release system worked so well, it proved very hard to keep skier and skis attached while performing tricks and inverted aerials, so athletes substituted washers for springs: problem solved!

I’ve taken this short detour down memory lane to highlight the fact that competition-level skiers have always followed very different guidelines than those imposed on the general skier population. As noted in this pensée’s first sentence, the rift between the two worlds has never been deeper or wider. Accelerating the divide between civilians and competitors has been the explosion of freeride/freestyle events such as slopestyle, half-pipe and big air. I can’t imagine how it’s possible for these phenomenal athletes to stay in their equipment when rotating fast enough to complete five – five! – full rotations.

So, I asked someone who knows what it’s like to create trailblazing new maneuvers, Jonny Moseley, about what it takes to keep from twisting right out of your skis as you launch skyward. (In the full disclosure department: in Moseley’s first big air comp since I signed him to a 5-year deal with Head back in 2001, he pulled one of his skis off in mid-air while throwing down a mute-grab dinner roll. He somehow managed to land cleanly on one leg, but it was nonetheless an inauspicious debut.) I asked Moseley what settings he used to compete on, and what he now uses for free-skiing.

“When I was mogul skiing on Markers I would use their race model, which went up to 24; I’d usually run a 17 or 18 in competition. Now I’m often on a (Marker) Griffin, set around 12.” I asked Jonny what were the toughest conditions for bindings to stay attached – aside from pulling the ski off – which are basically three-fold: “The most common problem is the athletes are so strong they can just twist right out, even at very high settings. As athletes get stronger deeper into the season, we would routinely give the toe and heel an extra half-turn before every comp. The other two sketchiest situations involve landings: the shock on a very hard landing is brutal, and in soft snow the ski can sink and bend like a taco and when it recoils the binding can’t hold onto the boot.”

Moseley guestimates most freeride competitors are setting their bindings on 15 or thereabouts, or more depending on their strength and style. The transition from citizen settings to higher-than-recommended begins at a tender age. “You’d be surprised how young skiers can out-ski their recommended setting. The transition to higher settings can happen as young as 7.”

Happy Landings!

The standard-setting institutions, which oftentimes operate as though they were above the compromises inherent in the world of commerce, are not, in fact, above putting their finger on the scale of standards development. Witness the relative speed with which the GripWalk boot sole was adopted as the de facto norm despite the chaos of incompatibility it introduced, eradicating the era of total, across-the-board alpine boot/binding compatibility that preceded it.

Whatever the flaws of the standard, ISO-sanctioned method for determining the optimal release/retention setting, it works for the vast majority of the recreational skiing public. The fact that a relatively small sliver of exceptional athletes has to find their own optimal setting in order to perform at a surreal level doesn’t mean the existing norms need to change. Standardized norms, by themselves, don’t prevent R&D departments from dreaming up better solutions. What is required to advance the status quo is a re-commitment to creating new binding technology that takes full advantage of what we know about all that transpires at the ski/skier interface.

Creating the best possible binding for the world-class skier won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap. Which is why, all things considered, the status quo, warts and all, is unlikely to change. It is the hope of this commentator that the expertise represented among both elite coaches and the academic community comes together to develop a better understanding of ski injury dynamics and the technology available to improve skier safety for skiers of all abilities and aspirations.