Telemark Bindings: The Battle
Of The Titans
Black Diamond's stunning announcement
that it is building a "Holy Grail" proprietary telemark
binding system of its own is a declaration of war in a battle
that has actually been going on for quite some time.
by Mitch Weber
December 11,
2006-- The lines have been
drawn, the sides are set, it's Black Diamond (BD) and Garmont
versus Rottefella, Scarpa and Crispi, and they are now officially
locked in a high-stakes battle to determine the standard to which
future telemark boots and bindings will be built. It promises
to be a bloody war, but it will likely be a short one: the fact
of the matter is that none of the telemark boot manufacturers
will be able to afford to build to a weaker selling standard
for very long. The costs are too high, and the market is too
small. It's almost certain, there will likely be a big winner,
as well as a big loser, and sooner rather than later.
So how exactly did it come to this? It's
hard to say really, but clearly the chess-like moves leading
up to what promises to be the tele biz equivalent of a cage fight,
now fit together like the pieces of a simple jigsaw puzzle.
A little bit of NTN history...
Black Diamond was a founding member of
what used to be called "the consortium," a group of
tele boot and binding companies that had decided to work together
to create a new standard, a "new telemark norm," upon
which freeheel bindings of the future would be based. Scarpa,
Garmont and Crispi were original members of the consortium, as
were Black Diamond and Rottefella. The group's earliest NTN meetings
appear to have occurred sometime in 1998, and the basic elements
of the NTN binding of today were already in place, with patents
filed. Yes folks, you read that right: the NTN binding you are
seeing today has been in development for at least 8 years, probably
longer.
The group worked quietly and went unnoticed
for a couple of years or so. Then, in the fall of 2000, we found
out about "the consortium" and wrote a news report
based on the little information we had, which wasn't much. But
what we did have were patent drawings of the NTN binding, and
there it was, the stunner: an under-the-forefoot attachment to
the boot. It was a great topic for discussion on our then-fledgling
Telemark Talk Forum. Unfortunately, for everyone as it turns
out, the response from "the consortium" was to tighten
up ship. Non-disclosure agreements were passed around and signed...
everybody clammed up. It's likely now, looking back, that everyone
involved at the time probably regrets that this ever happened.
The NTN did not disappear as a story of interest, it had simply
changed to something not that far away from "industry consortium
secretly plotting to..." and here is where it got tricky...
plotting to what? Take over the the boot and binding market?
That didn't really make sense because they already had most of
it... Actually, they were just plotting, and that was bad enough
for discussion, but it was the secrecy that really began to cast
a dark cloud over the whole thing. This went on for years. We
would post an occasional update, as we did when we got to see
a pair of NTN boots in 2002, but invariably the answer to our
NTN queries would be a variation on, "it's going great,
the latest prototypes are awesome, you know I can't really talk
about this," and that would be it.
NTN began to fade as a story, except for
the lingering impression among many that something about this
just didn't seem right. A lot of the comments on our discussion
board centered on concerns over the anti-competitive nature of
a consortium made up of the industry's already dominant players.
As the years went by, the apparently slow to nonexistent progress
of the project simply confirmed these fears. No one was pushing
them. They had all the time in the world.
Flash forward a bit....
Licking his wounds in the aftermath of
the Skye Alpine O2 binding catastrophe, BD's CEO Peter Metcalf
must have been vowing to himself to never again get involved
in off-the-shelf type solutions. Around this time, BD Director
of Product David Mellon was given the task of putting together
a team of talented, young and energetic designers and engineers.
Thomas Laakso brought his expertise in high tech materials over
to BD from the snowboard industry. Paul Terry left Porsche, where
he had been involved designing the Boxster, moved to Utah, and
joined Laakso and Mellon. Brought on earlier to help rescue the
O2 project, design engineer David Narajowski became part of the
new team as well. And others. Looking back, this was the first
sign that BD had very big plans for the future, now that the
Ayliffe Fiasco was behind them.
At the same time that BD was expanding
its R&D department, the fall in the dollar against the Euro
was having a big effect on profit from BD's distribution partnership
with Scarpa..... as in BD wasn't making any.
In April, 2005, we learned that BD had
officially pulled out of further NTN development, beginning in
January, 2005, more than six months earlier. The news was included
in a "Getting up to speed on the NTN" article
that same month. Also in April, Rottefella decided to bring its
NTN binding out of hiding and show it off it off at a tele festival
in Europe. We followed up by interviewing Rottefella's Marketing
Manager Torbjorn Ragg for an article
on the site entitled, "Torbjorn Ragg On The Status Of
The NTN: Rottefella Breaks Years Of Official Silence By Agreeing
To An Interview."
Suddenly the NTN was alive and on everyone's
mind once more, this after being written off by many, and even
after having been declared "dead in the water" by one
industry wag (993kb
pdf) just the year before.
Then three months later came a true bombshell
announcement: BD was ending its partnership with Scarpa, an association
that had brought the freeheel world the revolutionary Termninator,
the first all plastic tele boot. "We haven't made any money
on boot sales in two years," Metcalf told me during an interview
around the time of BD's
breakup with Scarpa, in July of 2005. The split with Scarpa
was big news in its own right, but especially when coupled with
the earlier news of BD's decision to pull the plug on its involvement
in NTN. What was going on here anyway?
One year ago, December, 2005, Big Tim and
I travelled to Utah where, where on a visit to BD's headquarters,
we were given the details of Black Diamond's plan to manufacture
its own line of telemark and AT/Freeride boots. The light went
on. Suddenly everything began to make sense. Black Diamond had
to be working on an integrated telemark boot/binding system of
its own, to compete head to head with Rottefella's NTN.
Big Tim and I came up with a plan. That
night over a Mexican food dinner, I floated my idea by Dave Mellon
and Thomas Laakso. "I have been hearing rumors for awhile
now that you guys have a new binding in the works, a new system."
We both studied their faces carefully. For the briefest of moments,
the eyes of one (I won't say which) darted around faster than
a mouse being chased by a starving cat. I just about choked on
my margarita, we both saw him, it was so great. From that moment
on, Big Tim and I were sure that we had successfully connected
the dots. When the time came to report
on BD's venture into the boot business in January 2006, the story
was "BD to build a line of tele and AT boots, probably more..."
I asked Dave Mellon about BD's "new
binding system" every chance I got last year. It became
a running joke. Mellon got so good at deflecting, evading and
plain old acting, that I even began to have a little doubt. Maybe
I had misread those darting eyes? Then last summer I heard that
BD was indeed working on a boot/binding system, and the circumstances
surrounding the way the information came to me were such that
it absolutely had to be true. BD was going to go to war with
Rottefella in a battle to determine the next telemark norm. Knowing
this made our last interview with Mellon and Laakso at Summer
OR a lot of fun.
The next to last part of the puzzle fell
into place a couple of weeks after Summer OR when Rottefella
named Backcountry Access (BCA) as its sole North American
distributor, ending its distributor relationship with Garmont.
A year and a half earlier we had reported
that " Garmont is said to be definitely out..." of
the NTN project and we had been hearing for a long time that
the Vermont-based boot company was taking more of a wait and
see approach. When viewed within the context of other information
we have developed, all of this makes perfect sense, as the battle
lines have obviously been drawn. Garmont will side with B. In
our view all that is likely left for them to do here is to make
the announcement.
So what's next?
First off, it's important to remember that
this battle likely won't have any effect on the average telemark
skier for years, if ever. Boots with the 75mm toe aren't going
away anytime too soon. In fact BD's new tele boots are designed
to work with all bindings currently on the market, in addition
to their new binding system. Even if Rottefella's NTN sells well
enough to knock BD out of the box, it will be many years before
75mm boots and bindings disappear for good. Our current boots
and bindings work well, and have come a long way in recent years.
Not everyone will be anxious to adopt a new system.
This "Battle of the Titans" is
a war for the hearts and minds of a future generation of telemark
skiers yet to discover the sport. Viewed as such, it becomes
a little less threatening and far more fun to follow along. Indeed,
most of us had no idea it had already begun, but as can be seen
from the narrative above, the battle has been underway for many
months, perhaps even years. |