The Actual State
of Telemark Skiing Today
by Mitch Weber
Of course none of this matters
at all when we are out there almost endlessly making the tele
equivalent of surfing's bottom turns, but here is what is truly
going on in our sport....
April, 2009-- With the announcement of the demise of K2
Telemark last season, a perhaps bitter naysayer or two, along
with a few of our small part of the ski world's usual curmudgeons,
took the opportunity to publicly question the future of telemark
skiing as a sport. One example came in the form a front page
article in the SIA (Snowsports Industries America) trade show
daily rag thing last January, former Telemark Skier Magazine
editor Eugene Buchanon penned a piece entitled The
State of Free-Heel-- Tele Tumbles as Ski Lines Merge. In
it he noted the news from K2 as if it were a very big deal, even
an indicator of dark times for our sport.
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Buchanon quoted former Rottefella
NTN U.S. distributor and BCA owner Bruce Edgerly as saying, "Perhaps
NTN came ten years too late." Going on to note a rise in
popularity of AT-style skiing in the backcountry, Edgerly declared,
"Look at Europe, there's not a telemarker to be found."
I guess for some reason Edgerly
and Buchanon don't consider Scandinavia (where the telemark turn
remains rather popular) to be a part of the European continent,
and yet the take these two have on what is actually going on
in the sport is just as off the mark as their apparent knowledge
of basic, third-grade level geography. |
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The truth is this, K2 Telemark had
become something of an anachronism. Nearly a decade ago the late,
pure telemark and backcountry ski maker known as Tua dropped
the distinction between its tele and AT skis, and while I can't
recall if Tua was the first to do this, soon they were hardly
alone. And it made sense because even way back then, not only
was there little to no difference in the skis people were using
for Tele and AT, the distinction between these skis and their
Alpine brethren was becoming more and more blurred as well. After
many years in which Alpine ski design had been driven by racing,
the Alpine market shifted. New designs and modern materials began
to be used to build skis far more suited to the needs and desires
of recreational skiers, and not fire-balling gate crashers. Improved
technologies allowed ski designers to develop boards that were
fatter than ever, and which also sported a rounder, more user-friendly
flex, all without giving up the torsional rigidity (resistance
to twist) so necessary for positive edge hold. It's fair to say
that the majority of alpine skis became more like telemark and
backcountry skis in their design, thus blurring the lines between
all three categories even further. In the early part of this
decade, the progressively designed Line Mothership alpine ski,
and its tele and AT sibling the Jak, made by Line's then parent
company Karhu, was just one of many examples, albeit one of the
more obvious.
The mainstreaming of backcountry
skiing that we are seeing today is very much like the mainstreaming
of telemark skiing that took place some years ago, and so K2's
decision to scrap it's telemark division in favor of a new, all
inclusive "backside" line, is nothing more than a logical
progression of a trend that's been underway for some time. That
K2 Telemark held on as a distinct brand for as long as it did
speaks more to the force of the personality of the brand's director,
Mike Hattrup,
than anything else. And to imply that K2's decision is an indicator
that telemark skiing is slipping as a sport, or that its future
is somehow dimming due to the increasing popularity of AT bindings
among alpine resort-to-backcountry crossover skiers, is simply
nonsense. There is no other word for it.
The article also refers to an early
season SIA report descibing a "posthole-like, 23% year-to-year
plunge" in the sales of telemark skis, a figure we think
may not tell an accurate story. As already noted, most of the
tele and backcountry ski makers stopped making and marketing
skis specifically for either AT or tele years ago, as the aforementioned
Karhu did at the start of its Jak-led comeback in 2001. With
at least a dozen mostly well-received models in its current ski
line, Black Diamond has come on very strong in just the past
two years, and BD doesn't make the distinction. The same is true
for G3 with their fast growing-in-popularity ski line. K2 and
Rossignol continued to hold onto the old notion of specific skis
for AT and tele, as market leaders, they probably didn't want
to mess with what had heretofore been a successful sales strategy.
So which is the more likely explanation for SIA's purported "tumble"
in tele ski sales? Is it that tele has suddenly become less popular?
Or could it just be that, at last, Rossignol Telemark and the
late K2 Telemark finally had three very strong competitors in
BD, G3 and Karhu? None of which make skis defined as being specifically
for freeheel skiing. We think its very probably the latter, and
yet we would not be surprised to see SIA badly miss the mark
here. After all, flying squarely in the face of what we were
seeing with our own eyes, through the entire first half of this
decade SIA told us that telemark and backcountry skiing was falling
precipitously in popularity.
There was just one very big problem
with that analysis, SIA was only counting sales at "brick
and mortar" shops and stores. Finally, in 2006, they got
around to surveying online retailers as well. The result was
a total embarrassment for SIA, for we then learned that during
all those years when SIA was telling us telemark was headed for
the ditch, the opposite was happening. The sport was actually
growing quite nicely. As it turned out, tele and backcountry
skiing's longtime "DIY" (do-it-yourself) culture was
tailor made for an emerging internet marketplace. In SIA's November,
2006 Executive Market Summary, their first report to include
internet sales, the trade group was forced to admit that so far
that season "online shoppers had bought more telemark bindings
than (did) those visiting the stores." Adding even more
egg to their face, SIA also admitted that "online sales
of randonee/AT (gear) were nearly double those of the
specialty stores." Leading SIA to conclude that freeheel
skiers "are finding the gear they want online." In
another
report the following season SIA revealed that in excess of
three times more telemark, AT and cross-country ski gear was
being sold online than in specialty stores, and this time SIA
was even more blunt in stating, "Specialty stores should
note that this crowd isn't finding what it wants in the brick
and mortar."
Think about this for a minute. In
a shocking display of absolute incompetence, this huge ski industry
trade group, SIA, had been authoritatively telling the world
for years that telemark and backcountry skiing was on the skids,
all the while failing to count not just an easy to overlook percentage
of the actual market, but well more than half of total
sales in the entire freeheel category!
As previously mentioned, it had
always seemed obvious that something was very wrong with SIA's
telemark sales numbers. At many resorts, and even in the media,
it was becoming quite clear that telemark had hit the mainstream.
Still, year after year, SIA continued to give the impression
that the present, as well as the future of freeheel skiing was
bleak, at best. And yet all one had to do to understand what
was then happening was to get out on the slopes at a few major
ski areas in North America. Eventually we began to wonder, do
these people at SIA even ski or snowboard?
Now let's take a look at what is
really going on in our sport today.
In a bold bid to create a "new
norm," or standard way of connecting our boots to our skis,
Rottefella has introduced the world's first, mass produced, modern,
full-featured telemark binding, and despite the extremely high
cost of designing and manufacturing plastic tele boots of any
kind, but in particular developing and manufacturing plastic
tele boots to an entirely new norm, three of the four
boot makers, Scarpa, Garmont and Crispi are now onboard with
NTN. This fall we will see half a dozen or more NTN models on
store shelves. And it's not just NTN that's getting all of the
attention either. There will also be a boatload of new telemark
boot models from several manufacturers available next fall, all
built to the old 75mm telemark norm. The fourth boot maker, Black
Diamond, is sticking to the old norm for now, and yet this past
season, the inaugural year of its boot line, BD introduced more
telemark boot models than it offered for AT.
It's also worth noting that traditionally,
it has always been considered difficult to get a handle on the
growth of telemark skiing by looking at the number of pairs of
skis sold. There has always been a lot of crossover, with many
tele-ers buying alpine skis for tele, or converting a pair they
already own. And looking at the number of bindings sold hasn't
been very useful either: Tele skiers have notoriously repaired
their bindings rather than replace them, and we are also well
known for moving used bindings from old skis over to newly purchased
boards. As a result, the thinking has always been that with their
internal sales figures, it is the boot makers who are most likely
to have the best information with regard to various trends. While
tending to be very quiet about it, the boot manufacturers have
been regarded as having the best shot at knowing what's really
going on.
With this in mind, and again, given
the high cost of the molds needed to produce a size run of an
entirely new model (estimated to be well in excess of one million
dollars), it is significant that all four of the tele boot manufacturers
very obviously remain more committed than ever to the future
of freeheel skiing.
Clearly the boot makers, Scarpa,
Garmont, Black Diamond and Crispi, have all voted with their
large sums of development money. So has Rottefella with its NTN.
As has BD, Voile, G3 and 22-Designs with updated and popular
free-pivot/touring mode 75mm norm bindings. The results of these
"votes" are in: It's an exciting time for telemark
skiing, and the future of our sport continues to burn bright. |