The Kore 103 W is the unisex Kore 105 with a slightly forward mounting point, in a limited size run of only 3 lengths. A strong, athletic woman might think of looking past the women’s size selection at a 184cm, in order to maximize flotation and stability at speed, but if you pay heed to the testimony of the plus-sized Jim Schaffner, that’s probably a bad idea.
“In the shorter size, I felt the 105 to have even greater range and playfulness than the 184cm,” asserted the founder of Start Haus and an active race coach. “I must credit Head for delivering a ton of performance in the Kore line. With the exception of the 105, I skied all of the Kore models in the 177, and they all had amazing horsepower for a svelte 230-pounder like me.”
Schaffner’s experience underscores the importance of length selection. I, too, skied the 2023 Kore 105 in both a 184cm and 177cm, and found the shorter length to be substantially more maneuverable, playful and fun. With Graphene in its design arsenal, Head can make a make a ski that’s as stiff as a brick or flexible as a reed, and can just as easily fiddle with the ski’s rigidity anywhere along its flex pattern. This is what allows the Kore 103 W to be supple enough underfoot for a lighter weight skier to bend it, but firmer flexing at the extremities, so it can provide enough support from tip to tail to keep a tank like Schaffner afloat… and grinning ear to ear.
It takes time to figure out how to optimize a new material, so the second generation of the design, launched in 2022, deleted synthetic Koroyd honeycomb from the core, replacing it with a combination of poplar and Karuba. Head also softened up the flex, part of an overall strategy to make the wider Kores better adapted to deep snow and the narrower ones more attuned to prepared slopes. One underappreciated element of the revised design is a beveled top edge that helps conserve energy by sliding sideways effortlessly through deep snow. And of course, the Kore 103 W is insanely lightweight, tipping the scales at a mere 1750g in a 177cm.
Its ultra-light weight also makes the Kore 105 an ideal in-resort/backcountry hybrid. The biggest concern any backcountry skier has about a super-light ski is that it will be great going uphill and suck on the way down, which sort of defeats the whole purpose. There’s zero chance the Kore 105 will flame out on the descent, as it’s far more substantial than any AT model of which I am aware.
The whole point of the Women’s Big Mountain genre ought to be making powder and crud skiing easier for people who don’t have time to train all year. (After all, how much help do highly experienced experts need?) The Kore 103 W’s energy-conserving construction was tailor-made for this mission.