Go Ripping Down That Hill

Racing legend Bode Miller has been trying to make the perfect skis for 15 years. He finally did it

- Gordy Megroz 

Bode Miller was already a dominant force on racing’s World Cup circuit before he found a pair of skis he really liked.

During the 2004 season, the New Hampshire native got a pair from Rossignol, his sponsor at the time, that were extremely stable and smooth yet also easy to turn—a trifecta that’s hard to achieve, especially in race skis. “My ability to adjust to terrain was miraculously better,” says Miller. “But from a design standpoint, I had no idea why this particular pair of skis was better than everything else out there.”

Miller piloted the skis that season to three Alpine Skiing World Cup giant slalom wins and clinched his only overall title in that discipline. The next season, he signed a lucrative contract with Atomic, and the beloved pair of Rossignols, which had been raced and filed so much that there was hardly any metal edge remaining, were passed on to Thomas Grandi—a Canadian racer who proceeded to win two races of his own, the only World Cup victories of his 16-year career.

Eventually, Miller got his hands on the skis again. This time, he dissected them to find out what made them superior. The secret sauce, he discovered, was a manufacturing flaw. Rossignol engineers normally glued a vibration-damping device to the tip of the ski. But in five pairs that were produced prior to the 2004 season, including the pair Miller raced on, they cut a hole through the metal in the ski and stuck the device to its wood core. Miller believes this was done because the glue the company was using to adhere the anti-vibration device to the ski’s topsheet wasn’t working. “Once they got better glue, they went back to sticking it to the top of the ski,” he says.