RealSkiers

Liberty Skis, the brainchild of Dan Chalfant and Jim Satloff, was born 20 years ago - over après ski beers - in Beaver Creek, Colorado, from the urge to develop a lighter ski that would reduce fatigue and return more energy to the skier than the relatively dead planks of the day. They were on the leading edge of the Lighter is Better movement in consumer goods that has come to dominate the current equipment landscape.

This installment of The Making of a Skier doesn't have much to do with skiing, but it does cover a formative period of my youth which has informed my life ever since. It is timely in that it references a time in our nation's past when we seemed as divided as we are today. I offer it as a balm to our national wounds.

My very special guest today has known the highest high and the lowest low a ski racer can experience, and handled both moments with style and grace. She pulled off the run of a lifetime at the perfect venue, the roars of the home-country crowd exhorting her to victory in Vail, crushing the field despite starting 30th. There were no crowds - no witnesses of any kind - when an unidentified course worker slammed into her just 45 minutes before her scheduled start at the Calgary Olympics, breaking her fibula and dashing a lifetime of dreams. Always a team player and a class act, Pam Fletcher stayed in Calgary to cheer her teammates on.

In today’s Revelation on Realskiers.com, I extol the virtues of the 2025 season’s finest Frontside models, skis with a much more expansive performance envelope than they are usually given credit for. My ultimate objective in celebrating Frontside models above all others is to help create a safer mountain for all skiers. The greatest danger to the out-of-bounds skier is avalanche, but the greatest danger to his in-resort brethren is collision. A great Frontside ski delivers the turning precision mandated by today’s over-populated groomers. Please remember, the responsibility to ski courteously applies to us all.

Bob Gleason assisted at the birth of the rear-entry boot when he worked alongside Denny Hanson in the early days of what would become a huge phenomenon. He is one of the founding savants who taught bootfitting in an era of anything-goes designs. He’s been teaching bootfitting skills, from the rudiments to the exotic, for 45 years, and counting.

Realskiers.com has a long history of publishing its ski test data on our members' site - until this year. Simply put, there isn't enough data to justify publishing it. Here's the story behind the story...

The ski trade is in a period of radical change, from brand ownership to dealer relationships. In my opening Revelation of the 2025 season, I take a snapshot of the current turbulent situation.

In today's edition of Realskiers with Jackson Hogen - the final installment of the 23/24 season - I explore the current crisis facing the ski retail community in collaboration with today's guest, Gary Fleming, the newly anointed president of Winter Sports Retailers, an organization that represents over 300 locations in the U.S.

There's no going back to the good old days, no matter how much we may miss them. This tidy excursion into the past asks the pertinent question, is skiing better today, or worse?

Jonny Moseley’s Olympic gold medal at the Nagano Games in 1998 set the stage for a post-competition career that would be the envy of any athlete. Of course, a lot of athletes have followed a victory with a spot on late-night TV, as Moseley did on the David Letterman show, but not many are invited back, and even fewer go on to host their own show, as Moseley did for three years on MTV (which was a much more important entity then than now), or make the cover of Rolling Stone, or host Saturday Night Live, or segue into the announcing booth, as Moseley did for NBC at the Vancouver Olympics.

This is the amazing story of the incomparable Jonny Moseley.