I’m currently reading “Two Planks and A Passion” (see right sidebar), a historical look at skiing. I haven’t gotten too far into it yet, but one thing that I already found interesting are ski shapes and dimensions. Things like fat skis, reverse camber, and reverse sidecut seem like new inventions, something just introduced in the last 10 or 15 years at most. Turns out, they’re not.
Some of the earliest skis ever discovered look like a lot of modern skis- reverse sidecut, well over 100mm in the waist, reverse camber, basically the whole deal. Just like the park rat jibbers of today are mostly just rehashing tricks the hotdoggers of the ’70s used to do, it turns out the modern shapes look a lot like some transportation device some hunter used to shoot reindeer back in the day. Weird, huh?