Blizzard applied its well-honed knack for morphing a unisex template into a genuine women’s model to its new Thunderbird/Phoenix series of mostly Frontside rides. The flagship Phoenix R13 Ti cuts a women’s specific (W.S.D.) TrueBlend core into a unique sidecut that shifts the entire shape forward 1cm, then moves the mount point to match it.
The Phoenix R13 Ti isn’t a watered-down design, but a brilliant, high-energy carver meant for women who know how to arc it and spark it. The international team of women who fined tuned its design are technical masters who log hundreds of test runs in pursuit of a better ski. When one of our female testers essayed the men’s Thunderbird R15 WB, she gave it perfect scores for technical merit; since the Phoenix R13 Ti is made along the same lines, it’s highly probable the women’s skis can rip just as well.
Compared to other elite carvers in the Frontside genre, the R15 W stands out for its rebound energy. If you give it a little jab in the belly of the turn, it will lift you off the snow – a dual-track carving heresy – and air mail you across the fall line. The energetic response is largely due to the R15 WB’s fully cambered baseline; Blizzard alleges there’s 2mm of rocker at the tip and tail, but I defy anyone to feel it. If you want to corner like a cutting horse, get forward on the R15 WB and you can slingshot yourself cross hill to your heart’s content.
One reason its grip is so secure is the T-Bird R15 WB takes it two sheets of Titanal all the way to the edge, so it never wimps out, even when the snow is adamantium hard. Three millimeters of the topsheet are exposed, to help reduce chipping and dings. Strong enough to race on and even more fun to free-ski, the R15 WB will become a daily driver for a lot of proficient skiers.
BTW, while not many are likely to find rack space on American shop walls, there’s an R15 with a 70mm waist that makes a 13.5m arc in a 165cm, roughly the radius of a FIS slalom. There’s also a 4-model family of lower-energy, lower-priced Thunderbirds for all the Frontside skiers who are still developing their edging skills.
The fate of Blizzard’s new Phoenix R14 Pro epitomizes the plight of the entire genre: although it’s almost certainly the highest performing Women’s Technical ski Blizzard has ever made, neither it nor its stablemate, the Frontside Phoenix R13 Ti, will make it to our shores this season.
What a pity, as we can infer from its unisex incarnation, the Thunderbird R15, that the Phoenix R14 Pro would be a ripper. This is not a design intended to tiptoe down the hill; its shape and its construction are made to fire down the fall line and blast off the edge. The Phoenix design is a product of Blizzard’s Women-2-Women program, but remember, the women concerned are ex-racers who haven’t forgot how to arc ‘em and spark ‘em. This is a ski the testers made for themselves. Maybe we’ll see it next year…
Overview Blizzard’s fortunes began to turn around several years ago when the Tecnica Group acquired the brand and factory in Mittersill, Austria, and pumped a few million euros into an overhaul. It’s often the case in the world of industry that he who builds the last...
Both the Sheeva 9 and the Black Pearl 88 are descendants of a line of off-trail parents; the template for the Pearl was the Brahma, the little brother of the mighty Cochise and Bodacious; the model for the Sheeva 9 was the Rustler 9, a spin-off of the Rustler 10 and 11. To better understand the nuances that distinguish the Pearl 88 from the Sheeva 9, it helps to understand the families they come from.
Distilled to its essence, the Pearl 88 has a smidgeon more aptitude for hard-snow skiing. Its Flipcore construction allows the forebody to join the rest of the ski on edge once it’s tipped and pressured, so the skier has the sense of riding the entire ski and not just a section of it. The front of the Sheeva 9 is made to be looser, to intentionally forego early connection to a fully carved turn. That it still feels solid throughout is a testament to the security imparted by a trimmed down top laminate of Titanal.
Blizzard calls this Ti treatment Dynamic Release Technology (D.R.T.). Its raison d’être is to liberate the tip and tail to twist and deform as it moves through the heavy snow and irregular surfaces that prevail off-piste. The wall-to-wall metal in the midsection restores order to the operation so the skier feels secure underfoot. “Great balanced ski,” says Jolee from Footloose, who put the Sheeva 9 through its paces at Mammoth Mountain. “It does great turning on groomers but also charging through the choppy snow.”
