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Best New Skis for 2012

10th March 2011, by Dave Watts

The test site, where all the major ski manufacturers had their new 2011/12 skis available for ski shops and the media to test

I spent last week in Bormio in Italy, testing the cream of next season’s brand new skis. Almost 800 pairs of skis from around 20 brands were available to test, and 160 people from the media and UK ski trade were there to test them. It is a huge operation logistically, with most of the UK distributors bringing their skis over from the UK to test.

Key trends were the onward march of ‘rocker technology’ and a big increase in the number of lightweight but wide skis designed for short ski tours, or just hiking to fresh snow from the top of the lifts. Rocker technology basically means the tip (and sometimes the tail) of the ski turns up before you would normally expect it to. The effect of this is that the skis float better in powder and power through the off-piste crud better than conventional skis. It also means that less of the ski is in contact with the snow when you are skiing groomed pistes, so the skis are easier to turn (and to swivel and skid for an intermediate). So they are better for both experts and intermediates, which must be a good thing.

But the talk of the test was the revolutionary new Salomon BBR ski. These have hugely wide tips of 140mm or more (compared with, say, 120mm for more conventional skis) – more like a surfboard than a conventional ski. I loved them and thought they were great fun, turning remarkably quickly and giving a solid, confidence-building platform, both on-piste and off. My guess is they will prove hugely popular and you’ll see these blue monsters everywhere for the next few seasons.

Other highlights for me included the new Volkl RTM (Ride The Mountain) range of all-terrain skis and Blizzard’s pricey but excellent Full Suspension range, which perform brilliantly. But all the brands had excellent skis. For more about which you should look at you’ll have to wait for the New Equipment chapter in the 2012 edition of Where to Ski and Snowboard (on sale in late-August/early September 2011) and for the detailed ski-by-ski reviews in the 2011/12 issues of Daily Mail Ski and Snowboard magazine (with my Daily Mail hat on I organized the magazine’s ski test for which we used twelve testers including for British downhill stars Martin and Graham Bell and Finlay Mickel.

For a sneak peak at the new Salomon BBR skis see:

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