Jason Levinthal shared an awesome story via J Skis’ Facebook page yesterday that was too good for me to ignore. He tells the story about how pro skier Eric Pollard convinced him to design a pair of 150mm wide skis at the waist that were only 172cm long.
These skis are the epitome of the super-wide-powder-ski craze that has slowly come back to reality in recent years. Remember when every single skier wanted to ride 115+mm underfoots as “all-mountain” skis? What a time to be alive, and I love that Pollard thought 150mm underfoots would be a good idea.
You can’t tell me that these skis wouldn’t have sold like hot cakes if LINE had made them back in the early 2000s. They’d probably ski like crap, but I bet every wanna-be POW hound out there would have picked up a pair just for the novelty of them.
I’ll let JLev take it from here… 😂
“A long time ago in a galaxy far far away @ericrpollard convinced @uncle_canada and I to build the widest, shortest ski in the world 150mm waist, 172cm long, symmetric, twin tip. Eric was determined to figure out how to make a ski that would allow him to stomp tricks backwards in pow like he did in the park.
This was around 20 years ago before there was such a thing as reverse camber, tip rocker or taper on skis and @salomon Pocket Rocket was the widest at 98mm waist. This specific version never worked well enough to justify releasing it to the public but it was an important prototype among hundreds of others that eventually led to some of our favorite modern pow ski designs.
Just like learning a new trick, figuring out a new ski design requires a lot of fails but if you’re persistent enough, you’ll eventually learn how far is too far, and do more of what works and stomp it. At one point @MSPfilms told him if he kept trying to land backwards in pow they’d weren’t going to film him because he was burning too much film slamming the back of his head tomahawking down the landings insisting it was possible, haaaa.
I just stumbled upon these in my basement archives last weekend so figured I’d share the story and couple shots of EP in mags skiing the wrong way on them.”
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