I recently had occasion to watch and eavesdrop on an attractive young person — gender is irrelevant, but let’s call her Suzie — trying on a pair of ski boots. The setting was the New York consumer ski show at the Meadowlands. The salesman was knowledgeable, patient, attentive. The equipment was exemplary and afforded great depth of choices. The atmosphere was warm and upbeat. I was privy to the birthing of a new skier.
But something went wrong. I don’t know for sure, but I think our sport lost Suzie. She sort of gave up after a while, bemused, certainly not angry; but her body language was projecting an unmistakable “who-needs-all-of-this?” attitude. If the turn-off occurred at any one moment it was probably when the salesman deftly detached the tongue of the boot and set it aside; she perhaps fondly recalled the simple pleasures of her snorkeling flippers.
While her eyes were glazing over, mine were being opened to something I have been watching for years but without comprehension: we have made our sport incredibly and absurdly complicated; we have built barriers. We have all been congratulating ourselves on the remarkable technological advances we have made in ski equipment, glowing about how we have made the sport easier and more fun to learn, but I suspect we crossed over the line some time ago to “what appears to be an inevitable tendency to complicate fun with gear and technical gadgetry,” which is how it was expressed by Witold Rybczynski in an essay in the New York Times, entitled “The Death of Leisure.” His conclusion: “Play is beginning to look more and more like work.”
Strange, isn’t it, that this should happen, when out on the playing fields our industry has labored so mightily and expensively — effectively, too, I think — to make the sport of skiing easy and friendly, with lifts that are faster and much, much easier to get on and off; slopes that are primped and preened into welcome mats; lessons designed to emphasize ease and fun.
Interestingly, the problem does not occur with what is probably the most researched and developed ski product, the binding. The designers have long since attained the point where skiers don’t even think about them any more. No right or left to worry about, nothing to fiddle with, just step in and off you go. To the average consumer they all work the same and all work well. No big deal.
But skis? Boots? Here the consumer enters an intimidating world of high-tech jargon — the bewildering world of conflicting claims in pursuit of the great god called “Performance.” To help sort it all out for the hapless skier — and of course to help sell subscriptions — are platoons of ski publication testers, who now enjoy celebrity status of their own, and sport special uniforms to authenticate their stardom. (Can you think of any other recreational activity that does this?)
One of the oddball —and one assumes unintended — messages a consumer gets from reading the frothy test reports is that the equipment determines how you ski, not you and your skiing ability. “[The ski’s] favorite turn was a fast GS, yet it could perform short, snappy turns.” “[The boot] skid turns well and executes short and medium turns nicely, entering easily and steering precisely with a forgiving exit.”
The other impression one gets is that you don’t really buy a ski boot, but a prosthesis for the foot, complete with wedges, pegs, custom footbeds, together with countless levers, cranks and screws with which to adjust a bunch of things you have probably never heard of, like cant, ramp angle and flex resistance. Then you may have to cope with the knowledge that “getting one [front-entry] to fit comfortably and ski well is a combination of luck and retrofitting.”
What a discouraging and daunting prospect it has become to go skiing! What barriers have we erected! How did we forget that skiing was supposed to be fun? Do we think (what arrogance!) that, lacking all these technological marvels, skiers didn’t have fun, that they didn’t have fun skiing back in the 50’s and 60’s when the sport was growing at a compound rate of 15 percent? Equipment is certainly subject to technological change, but fun isn’t; and fun is supposed to be what we are selling.
We are sending mixed messages when we promote to the non-skier. We make the equipment hurdle seem easy: just rent. If you want to buy your own but find it beyond your budget, buy used equipment, we say. Trouble is, we in the business don’t believe this. Skis maybe, but boots? No way. And virtually all of our messages confirm we don’t believe it because we insiders know you need “to feel the snow,” we know we need hair-trigger edge control. Maybe we should require all our instructors to teach on rented equipment so they could talk the same language as their pupils.
Then, too, we make the strange assumption that every skier is going to be an equipment junkie and we preach the need to tune skis. “All skis, whether brand new or five years old, need to be tuned,” proclaims our industry’s basic guide to the entry-level skiers, and goes on to tell the would-be skier that it can be done “using simple tools such as a file, P-tex candle and knife … ski tuning is not that difficult; it just takes time and practice to learn to do it properly … [but] you’ll discover the satisfaction that comes from mastering a simple craft.”
This message may hook a few, but what about most of us — and we’re a majority — who haven’t figured out how to tape a show on our VCRs, and who certainly don’t need a sport where the equipment has to be tuned even before it’s first used. Tennis rackets don’t need to be tuned, or golf clubs or snorkels.
While our industry has been building barriers, others have found ways to lower them and deliver performance. Think of photography. The dedicated hobbyist can get into the technologically exotic, but the industry has developed “point-and-shoot” equipment that gloriously combines ease with performance. They got their R&D priorities right. But where is the ski equipment equivalent? Nowhere.
It’s something to think about, and it leads me back to Rybczynski’s essay. He quotes from “The Wind in the Willows” where Toad says, “There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” The author comments, “But messing about is exactly what’s missing from most mock-professional recreations in which so much attention is paid to improving performance and increasing efficiency. … we will have to learn to rein in our native tendency for tinkering and self-improvement and rediscover the pleasure of uncomplicated recreation. Life is short; mess about.”
— David Rowan
