Anton Glider
Something new on the snow
Learning to ski is a thrill – but it is intimidating. A small percentage of new skiers feel exhilarated by the experience, but according to industry research, about 85% of first-time skiers feel frightened and uncomfortable, and don’t come back for a second lesson.
Reasons for the intimidation, according to market researchers with no experience teaching new skiers, are chiefly environmental: New skiers think the sport is too cold, too expensive, too remote, too uncomfortable.
Experienced ski instructors provide another reason: New skiers are frightened by their loss of control. They expect skis to slide forward, like an ice skate, and to turn smoothly, like a skate or bike. They are unprepared for skis to skid sideways and sideslip. Many new skiers experience skidding as a scary loss of balance. I would argue that these folks constitute a largish proportion of our first-day dropouts.
Traditional ski instruction doesn’t address this fear directly. Instead, we accommodate the skid by teaching a skidded turn. Beginning in 1897, with the introduction by Matthias Zdarsky of the stem, ski schools have taught a wide skidded stance, usually beginning with a “wedge” position, to provide speed control and stability. Today most of us who teach skiing recognize that in order to achieve expertise, the skier must later unlearn both the stem and, still later, the skid.
Expert skiers and ski instructors have long recognized that it would be more efficient to teach a parallel speed-control turn from the start rather than a stemmed or wedge turn. In the early days of alpine ski racing, world champions Toni Seelos and Emile Allais advocated this kind of skiing. After the war, Walter Foeger popularized the Natur Teknik method in about a dozen American ski schools. Today direct-to-parallel skiing is advocated in the Aspen Ski School, by Harold Harb at Sol Vista, and by a number of other progressive schools. Even so, slipping remains a problem for most new skiers, who lack the balance skills and strength to roll a ski onto a slicing edge to stop the skid.
The effort to teach pure parallel skiing from day one was given a huge boost beginning in 1993, with the introduction of the first deep-sidecut “shaped” skis. These skis edge, steer and carve much more easily, and at lower, friendlier speeds, than traditional “straight” skis.
However, shaped skis don’t eliminate the skid that frightens most first-day skiers. When turned on a low edge angle – typically about 5 degrees – today’s skis skid sideways on most firm surfaces. All ski school terrain is groomed firm and smooth to encourage this skid/slip, with the idea that it will help the skier achieve a “spontaneous parallel christie” – that is, a slow, skidded controlled parallel turn.
A skier who is intimidated by the skid usually can’t be coaxed to end it by rolling the ski onto a higher edge angle. If he or she perceives a loss of control at 5 degrees edge angle, it takes an act of courage to push the ski harder, out to 10 or 15 or 20 degrees, the realm at which intermediate skiers begin to carve.
What would keep new skiers comfortable, confident and secure is a ski that tracks without sideslipping, immediately, at only 2 to 5 degrees of edge angle. Our experience is that with a ski that grips immediately, like an ice skate or in-line skate, or like a bicycle, the new skier feels on more familiar ground, and proceeds instinctively, within a few runs, to smooth, controlled, balanced, wide-track parallel turn skiing.
Hence the Anton Glider, a very narrow shaped ski. Because the waist of the Glider is less than 35mm wide, the steel edge hooks up and steers effectively at very low edge angles. It’s a very secure, reassuring feeling for the new skier.
This is not by itself a new concept. The Olin Albert and the Elan Stealth both used a very narrow waist to achieve the same hook-up effect on firm snow. But these very narrow skis had a problem: there was insufficient structure to spread the load along the length of the ski. In effect, all the pressure went to the snow directly under the boot; the tip and tail were just along for the ride, and the skis exhibited hinge points at the ends of the binding platform that made it impossible to achieve a smooth round turn unless the ski was loaded very accurately through the arch of the foot. New skiers are not this accurate, and the Albert and Stealth were unforgiving.
The Glider, instead, is equipped with a sophisticated suspension system that spreads the skier’s weight along 100cm of the runner’s length. This gives the Glider an immense sweet spot; a new skier literally cannot make a mistake in stance.
The result is a fabulous teaching tool. Put a new skier on the Glider, on any sort of snow (except powder deeper than six inches), and he or she feels comfortable within a dozen turns. Within three or four runs, you’ll see wide track carved parallel turns, at edge angles up to 20 degrees, and the skier may be linking turns with smooth, continuous fluidity. On the second day the skier is comfortable at edge angles up to 35 degrees and may be ready for carved turns.
And the skills are transferable to conventional-width skis. After a day or two on Gliders, the skier can jump onto intermediate-level shaped skis and make the same carved parallel turn in most snow conditions.
Gliders carve brilliantly on ice and hard snow. In soft snow up to six inches deep, they behave exactly the same way. The narrow runners penetrate to the firm underlying surface, and carve there. The skier, who doesn’t expect the runners to skid, doesn’t try to steer them in powder, but naturally follows the runners around in a pure powder turn. The suspension soaks up invisible terrain variations under the powder blanket; because of the immense sweet spot there is no loss of fore-and-aft control. Moreover, because the skier load is spread along 100cm of running surface, effective bearing surface in powder is over half of the effective surface of a conventional shaped “midfat” ski – fully adequate for powder over a groomed surface.
--Seth Masia
PSIA Level III
Vail/Beaver Creek Ski School, Colorado