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53-537: The SCX proved to dramatically improve turn performance and made it much easier to perform the efficient carve turn . This led to higher speeds in giant slalom , and the ski started winning race after race when it was introduced. It also made skiing easier in general, and revolutionized ski schools, especially in the US where the design first caught on. By 1996 every major ski company was racing to introduce similar designs, and traditional designs were being sold off for pennies on

106-457: A "rolling" of both skis from edge to edge. Recreational skiing is usually done at speeds in range between 5 m/s and 15 m/s with average turn radius of less than 15 m. Accordingly, sidecuts of modern recreational skis are calculated for turn radius of approximately 7 to 15 m. Unlike a skidding turn, which primarily uses the skidding effect to reduce speed (hence the "Z"-path), a (perfect) carved turn does not lose any speed because there

159-416: A constant width. Their first prototype was 193 centimetres (76 in) long and has been lost. The second one was 203 centimetres (80 in) long, a typical length for men's skis in this era, and is still skiable. By 1991 these experiments had clearly suggested a new design that was 110 millimetres (4.3 in) wide at the tip, 63 millimetres (2.5 in) in the waist, and 105 millimetres (4.1 in) at

212-515: A fad or gimmick. Elan, however, had introduced a cap ski of their own shortly after the S9000. They built the SCX on these lines, thereby combining all of the latest features in a single ski. This left Elan in the undisputed lead introducing the new shape. When describing the turns the SCX produced, Franko used the term "parabolic". The term immediately caught on, and became so popular that every ski like it

265-474: A number of pre-production SCX skis were sent to instructors in the US for practical experimentation. They invariably reported dramatic results, with intermediate skiers able to produce carving turns easily, even in poor conditions that experts would normally find difficult. Realizing they had a winning design, the Elan team started designing a series aimed at the training market, including a 163 cm long design for

318-533: A pair of the company's standard hickory Rocket skis, they cut away wood until they produced a 15 millimetres (0.59 in) sidecut. When they tried them out, they found they turned quite easily in a series of rounded turns. Ironically, this was considered poor form in the era of the stem Christie , where good form was a series of sharp J-shaped turns. The two abandoned the design, speculating that they ended up as firewood. In any event, wooden skis of this era did not offer much torsional stiffness; when rolled on-edge by

371-723: A radical 19–mm sidecut ski for a radius of 14 m. In tests, Elan found that its skis substantially boosted skier capability. Engineers experimented and were funded at Atomic, Blizzard and others. With cuts of 20 mm, short skis were a necessity to avoid unnecessarily heavy tips and tails. Increasing widths held snow contact constant as lengths and turn radius plummeted. The necessary tip and tail mass as well as carved edge contact made 180 cm skis as stable as straight skis 20% longer. Design challenges such as engineering increased stiffness to keep wide tips from bending over bumps and in deeps continued to be met as Wright's law took over ski design. Some ( Atomic , Fischer and Head ) leaped at

424-461: A series of stepwise improvements; laminate woods, metal edges, metal laminates (see the article on the Head Standard ) and finally the fibreglass torsion box design were introduced over a period of 100 years. Throughout, little engineering effort had been spent on considering the ski shape, as other issues like torsional stiffness and "chattering" were problems that needed to be solved. Skis of

477-447: A sought after by consumers. Volant released a 12mm cut ski in 1992, followed by Dynastar, and K2. Elan engineers Jurij Franko and Pavel Skofic experimentally adjusted sidecut and developed a physical model—desired radius, speed, forces and lean one could generate, and bend the ski to solve for this combination. By 1991 they released a ski with a sidecut that was, at 22.25 mm, three times that of previous standard for slalom skis and

530-426: A teaching ski with an 8 m radius (31mm sidecut) and the first asymmetric ski, with no up hill cut and, because side cut involves proportionately wide tips, a platform for the boot to allow a very narrow waist. A total of 150 pairs were produced. In 1990 Volkl released their metal "Explosiv" with a 10-mm sidecut and 28-m turn radius. K2 introduced a 10mm sidecut race ski, whose improved edging and turning ability became

583-480: A tight, 15–m turning radius. It took eight of the top ten places in its initial racing, allowing skiers to stand with a stronger straighter leg and make the desired carve. In the US, ski instructors found that students could easily make parallel turns that would otherwise take considerable practice and training. The company put the ski on the market in 1993 as the Elan SCX . Kneissl, struggling in bankruptcy released

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636-526: A turning motion. The carve is efficient in allowing the skier to maintain speed because, unlike the older stem Christie and parallel turns , the skis do not create drag by sliding sideways. Starting a carved turn requires the ski to be rotated onto its edge, which can be accomplished through angulation of the hips and knees applied to both skis, leading them to efficiently carve a naturally parallel turn. Carving turns are generally smoother and longer radius than either stemmed or parallel turns. Carving maintains

689-601: Is Franco Fogliato. Salomon is part of Amer Sports , headquartered in Helsinki (Finland). The US operations of Salomon are located in Ogden, Utah . Salomon also sponsors and hosts many trail races throughout the world, including the Golden Trail Series . It also runs Salomon TV, a channel that tells inspirational stories about athletes, places and interesting characters from the world of skiing, trail running, and

742-436: Is made with a side-cut radius. This is the radius of a circle that would fit into the shape of the edge of the ski if viewed in plan-view. This is approximately the maximum radius of turn that can be cleanly carved. Expertly used skis are capable of carving clean circular arc segments whose approximate minimum radius is proportional to the cosine of the angle of tilt multiplied by the side-cut radius. Carving typically involves

795-411: Is no braking action in the turns. Rather, the reduction of the average path slope angle resulting from the skier's S-shaped path down the slope, as opposed to a path straight down, reduces the skier's speed. The skier wishing to go slower must wait a little longer before initiating the next C-turn, making the "C" longer. This will lead the skier to ski more across the slope (in extremes uphill), reducing

848-481: The Salomon S9000 in 1990. All of the major manufacturers were introducing cap ski designs of their own, and had little interest in another radical change at the same time. This was not the only problem; the ideal design featured tips and tails that wouldn't fit in conventional presses, and the presses that were wide enough were busy producing snowboards. The concept was not only ignored, but actively dismissed as

901-556: The Slovenian Elan company thrived combining new manufacturing with “parabolic” ski design. In 1994 K2 launched its K2 Fours: a 22 meter radius 195 cm downhill ski. In 1996 Bode Miller took multiple wins. The market shifted dramatically, with "old" skis piling up, unsalable even in clearance racks.1996 was also the year when Skis Lacroix presented the first Parabolic ski in France, called "Morpho". Designed by J.B. and H.M., it

954-403: The centripetal force the skier brings their center of mass to the inside of the turn. This is like a cyclist leaning to the inside of a turn to avoid being thrown off of their bicycle. Beginners to the sport are often hesitant to angulate into these turns, as they feel that such an action will cause them to fall. Ski instructors therefore teach new skiers to overcome this hesitation. The ski

1007-495: The 1970s were largely identical in shape to those of the 1800s. Skis with narrower waist profiles had been experimented with, but had never become widely used. In 1939, Dick Durrance ordered a custom ski from Thor Groswold's factory in Denver with a 7 mm sidecut, and this became a new standard for slalom skis. During the winter of 1948/49, Jerry Hiatt and Thor's son Jerry decided to experiment with even bigger sidecuts. Taking

1060-637: The 1990s, the technique was not simple to learn. Since then, it has become accessible and carving is commonly taught as a form of parallel skiing alongside the classic parallel "brushed" technique. Modern downhill technique is generally a combination of carving and skidding, varying the ratio between the two when rapid control over the turn or speed is required. Pure carving is a useful technique on "groomers" – slopes of moderate steepness with smooth snow – with skis dedicated to this style. Other situations remain almost pure parallel Christie technique, such as competitive mogul skiing , with edged turn initiation aided by

1113-537: The Axendo and Rossignol the Cut, their first shaped designs. For the 1995/6 season, the new designs accounted for only 3% of total sales. By the next year, with all the major players involved, they accounted for 50%. By 1997 every manufacturer had a variety of skis with differing sidecuts, and older designs were derisively dismissed as "skinny skis". These older designs clogged the discount racks, and top-of-the-line models from

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1166-639: The Four, Three and Two. The Four was a race ski, and as is typical in the industry, was the first to be produced. When Bode Miller started winning races on the K2 Four in the 1996 Junior Championships, the other large companies took note. Yet the European companies continued to view it as a curiosity, an American fad. But when racers started buying them over any other design, these companies started frantic efforts to produce similar designs. In 1996, Salomon introduced

1219-489: The Olin executives asked ski designer Frank Meatto if it were possible to make a beginners ski that would make skiing easier to learn. Meatto and co-designer Ed Pilpel decided to experiment with a radical sidecut as a way of improving turns. They designed a ski with a 31 millimetres (1.2 in) sidecut, but it had tips that were 128 millimetres (5.0 in) wide and they wouldn't fit into their presses. They solved this by cutting

1272-458: The Olympic and Paralympic torch relay. Salomon produces products for various sports markets, including trail running , hiking , climbing , adventure racing , skiing , and snowboarding in over 40 countries on five continents. They used to manufacture inline skates , transferring technologies from their ski boot range, but have not released any in recent years. Salomon's current CEO

1325-438: The SCX, and lengths have increased somewhat, but the SCX had revolutionary effects on design. Carve turn A carved turn is a skiing and snowboarding term for the technique of turning by shifting the ski or snowboard onto its edges. When edged, the sidecut geometry causes the ski (in the following, snowboard is implicit and not mentioned) to bend into an arc, and the ski naturally follows this arc shape to produce

1378-495: The University of Ljubljana in 1983 with a degree in engineering and in 1985 and took a position at Elan in 1987. In 1988 Franko took up the idea of experimenting with deeper sidecuts and started the "Sidecut Extreme" project to test it. He was joined by Pavel Škofic, who calculated the stress loading on a ski with a wasp-waisted layout. Previous ski designs had so little sidecut that they could be treated with calculations based on

1431-525: The XT-6 trail-ready sneaker as one of the must-have sneakers of the year. Celebrities such as Bella Hadid , Hailey Bieber , and Emily Ratajkowski have been spotted sporting the shoe. Salomon shoes have also increased in popularity thanks to gorpcore , a fashion aesthetic that is centered around the utilitarian and practical style of outdoor apparel. Salomon produces sports accessories for skiing, snowboarding, hiking, road running, and trail running. They have

1484-429: The average path slope angle. A carved turn is distinguishable by its subsequent "pencil line" mark left in the snow . This indicates that only the edge of the board made contact with the snow, and no skidding took place during the turn. The rider is using pressure, twist and tilt to get only the side of the board into the snow. Then engaging the sidecut edge which determines the carved turn shape. This type of turn causes

1537-420: The board to bend and store a large amount of potential energy during the turn. Allowing this potential energy to be released and then used to propel the boarder into the next turn. The act requires the snowboarding skills of twist, tilt, and pressure to engage the edge into the snow and start the turn. No pivoting should be involved while the edge of the board is engaged with the snow as it will cause skidding, or

1590-468: The dollar. As the first successful "shaped" or "parabolic" ski, the SCX is considered one of the most important advances in the history of the sport. The first true downhill skis, made in Telemark , Norway by Sondre Norheim , were handmade from single pieces of hardwood and featured a relatively modest sidecut of about 4 to 5 mm. Alpine ski development after this seminal introduction proceeded in

1643-545: The edge to release from the snow. Salomon Group Salomon SAS is a French sports equipment manufacturing company headquartered in Annecy , France. It was founded in 1947 by François Salomon in the heart of the French Alps and is a major brand in outdoor sports equipment. Salomon is owned by Finnish retail conglomerate Amer Sports , along with Wilson , Atomic , Precor, and Arc'teryx , among others. Salomon

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1696-406: The edges. The new design was an immediate hit on the local race market; in its first outing with the ski, the Elan team took the top eight of ten places. In 1991, Elan used their research examples to produce a new commercial ski, the SCX. The company sold it across Europe, but found it difficult to break into a market dominated by the large players, Salomon and Rossignol . In the spring of 1993,

1749-462: The fray with the 15 mm sidecut Ice and there was a similar model from Head, the Cyber 24. The large conglomerates, Salomon, Rossignol and K2, continued to ignore it. K2 was the first among the major manufacturers to follow Elan's lead. In 1994 they designed a prototype with a 98 mm tip that would fit into their 100 mm presses. They planned on producing a range of skis based on this design,

1802-472: The gates were moved further apart and resulted in much more turning. K2 responded with the GS Race with a 10 millimetres (0.39 in) sidecut, and several similar designs followed. In spite of reports that these skis were easier to turn, they were considered specialty items and the designs offered only to the race and performance markets. One particularly notable experiment was made at Olin . In 1984, one of

1855-418: The instructors, and a 143 cm long version for students and junior racers. This was much shorter than most skis of the era, further differentiating them from other skis on the market. These were being demonstrated across Europe and the US during December 1993. The change in length was not accidental. With most of the mass distributed at the ends of the skis, the rotational inertia was considerably higher and

1908-478: The moguls themselves. Shaped skis, also called parabolic skis , make carved turns possible at low speeds and with short turn radius. Skis had sidecut since they were first carved from wood – typically around 5mm on a long ski. But it wasn't until the early 1980s that much deeper cuts were explored. In 1979 Head developed the "Natural Turning Radius" concept and skis with 7.3mm sidecut (~35 m radius). Olin Corp developed

1961-463: The mould, snowboard designers had to experiment to find the right layout. The 1975 Burton Backhill had a 17 millimetres (0.67 in) sidecut, giving the board a very short turning radius. The Backhill was extremely low-tech in comparison to contemporary ski designs, consisting largely of a sheet of plywood . A contemporary ski's torsion box design greatly improved torsional stiffness and would allow even greater sidecut to be effective. But in spite of

2014-444: The new designs while others resisted ( Rossignol /Dynastar, K2 ) or took other directions ( Salomon with their incredibly successful cap or “monocoque” design). The expense of competing against the dual innovations of the new carving skis and radical manufacturing innovation such as the cap, and investment in new presses to handle the width of carving skis saw several companies go to the wall, including Blizzard, while innovators such as

2067-410: The outdoors. They have a wide range of indoor and outdoor clothing for men, women, and kids that include jackets, base layers, shorts, pants, and tights. Salomon has shoes for various activities but specializes in shoes for outdoor activities like skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and trail running. While Salomon hiking shoes are designed with outdoor sports in mind, in 2023 the fashion industry adopted

2120-486: The parabolics, and generally 160 to 170 cm after. Other companies were aware of the SCX, and several had already been working on a radical sidecut designs of their own. In particular, Atomic had been developing a similar concept known as the S-Ski, and had shown it at US trade shows during the winter of 1993. However, the market was already in the midst of a major change to the "cap ski" construction method, sparked off by

2173-569: The previous year could now be purchased for $ 29.95. It became clear that skis should have always been shaped this way, and one designer later noted that "It turned out that everything we thought we knew for forty years was wrong." By the 1997/98 season every ski company was producing only parabolic designs. Despite fire-sale prices on older designs, parabolics accounted for 70% of all ski sales by 1999. Over time they came to be known as carving skis, super-sidecuts, hourglass skis, and finally shaped skis. Modern designs tend to have less radical sidecut than

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2226-497: The ski in half longitudinally, leaving the curve only on the inside edge, which powers the turn. The ski was so narrow underfoot that additional platforms had to be added to mount the bindings. The result was effectively one-half of the parabolic designs that would follow. The company produced 150 pairs to demonstrate at the SIA trade show in 1986, but no one purchased the odd-looking asymmetrical "Albert" design. Jurij Franko graduated from

2279-421: The ski running base to the snow surface). Combined with sidecut, this creates a curved interface to the snow, and at a turn of that radius, the ski carves, rather than skids , with all points of the edge of the ski traveling along the same curve on the snow surface. These basic physical facts drive the radical parabolic sidecut. When making a carving turn, a skier is skiing in dynamic equilibrium , so to balance

2332-416: The skier making a series of "Cs", or half circles, down the hill (with two consecutive "C"s forming an "S"). Skidding turns on the other hand would rather follow a Z-shaped path. Some instructors teach their students to think of these half circles as a clock . For example, the most extreme left portion of a turn would be at 9 o'clock and the extreme right is 3 o'clock. The turns are accomplished by utilizing

2385-460: The skier's boots, the tips and tails of the ski would tend to twist in the opposite direction in order to lie flatter on the snow, reducing the sidecut's performance improvement. Hiatt and Groswold's experiment required such a deep sidecut that the waist had little vertical stiffness, another problem for the design. A radical change in design did not occur until the mid-1970s introduction of the first modern snowboards . With no previous designs to set

2438-399: The skis efficiently turning along the direction of travel as opposed to skidding at an angle across the direction of travel. For a given velocity, carving with shaped skis typically requires less effort than stemming or parallel and offers increased speed and control in even steep descents and highly energetic turns, making it ubiquitous in racing. Prior to the introduction of "shaped skis" in

2491-456: The skis were difficult to rotate under the foot. Additionally, as was discovered by Groswold and Hiatt half a century earlier, with so much force being applied at the end of the skis, they had to be much stronger under the waist. The solution was simply to make the ski considerably shorter, reducing the moment arm and counteracting these effects. Skis quickly evolved to shorter lengths; 190 to 210 cm were typical lengths for men's skis prior to

2544-615: The snowboard demonstrating that modern skis could carry much wider sidecuts, and that such a sidecut resulted in excellent turn performance, little came of this development. The snowboard market was ignored by the major ski companies through the 1970s and 80s. Experiments with slightly greater sidecut on skis did appear during this period, including the Head Yahoo and especially the Atomic Powder Plus. Further developments followed due to changes in competitive giant slalom , as

2597-429: The tail. This produced a sidecut of 22.25 millimetres (0.876 in), three times the conventional 7 mm sidecut of the average race ski, and over double that of even the most radical designs in use. The ski was so prone to turning that racers did not have to angle their legs as much in order to generate the same turn, allowing them to stand more upright with less bend in the knee, and thereby apply much more force to

2650-617: Was based on an asymmetric construction, featuring one left ski and one right ski. The inside and outside lines of the ski were different, being "asymmetric" to compensate for the shorter distance the inside ski had to cover compared to the longer one for the outside ski. These skis exhibited amazing carving speed in giant slalom when used properly. A couple of years later, Atomic copied the concept and created their own ski called "Differential". Although these skis would still win races today, they were not used to their full potential as nobody used them as they should be. Skis bend when edged (angling of

2703-464: Was changed to Adidas-Salomon AG . The purchase also included TaylorMade and Maxfli . Adidas then later sold the company to Amer Sports in 2005. For the first time in its 76-year history, Salomon has become a Premium Partner for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 . As part of the partnership, Salomon will supply apparel, footwear, and accessories to technical staff, competition judges, volunteers, and those participating in

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2756-460: Was founded in 1947 in the city of Annecy in the heart of the French Alps. François Salomon launched the company by producing ski edges in a small workshop, with only his wife and son, Georges, to help. Georges Salomon is credited with taking the company and evolving it toward the global outdoor sports brand it is today. The Salomon Group was purchased by Adidas in 1997 and the official name

2809-484: Was soon called "a parabolic". Every mention of the term led back to the SCX, providing excellent visibility for the company. When it hit the stores during the winter of 1993, it was named "ski of the year" in the trade press. By 1994 a number of smaller companies had introduced parabolic skis of their own, including the Atomic S-Ski and similar Kneissl Ergo (which developed from Olin's earlier models). Fischer joined

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