On January 17th, 2022, a US Ski and Snowboard (USSS) ban on using perfluorocarbon-based wax products (“fluoros”) at all International Ski Federation-sanctioned (FIS) races in the country went into effect. The action marked the critical point in a rapid evolution of policies meant to limit competitive nordic skiing’s emission of perfluorocarbons, part of a class of especially environmentally persistent, and potentially health-concerning, chemicals known as PFAs. Overnight, The cumulative knowledge of 40 years on ski preparation nulled. Since then, it’s been a brave new world.
Step into a wax room these days, and you’re unlikely to hear codewords like “Cera F” and “Jetstream” muffled from behind the gas masks that became standard issue near the end of the fluoro-era. The scramble to take everything into account—from snow temp to air temp, ski selection, grind, and base material too—and funnel it into putting the best ski on the snow for a race is still there. The rules may have changed, but the game is the same.
Two and half seasons into fluoro-free racing, there have been countless tests by wax technicians across the continent to figure out just what they’re working with on any given race day. Among them has been long-time American “ski whisperer” Zach Caldwell, owner and operator of Caldwell Sport in Putney, Vermont. As New England thawed out from its last snowstorm of the season, and US Skiing from the season that accompanied it, FasterSkier caught up with Caldwell to learn what he’s learned about where the limiter of fluoro-free waxing has started to push ski service.
Speak to Caldwell, and you’ll quickly get acquainted with jargon that acquaints you with his professorial approach to ski service. He’ll often talk about “solutions,” that is, the singular result of combining the “pie” of factors (see our 2022 discussion on what makes a ski fast featuring Caldwell here) that go into a race-ready ski. In that pie, you’ll find ski camber, ski flex, base grind selection, hand-applied structure, and everything that can be broadly categorized as wax. He also cites how “robust” solutions are the best solutions; that is, where the overall combination of the factors within that ski performance pie can be adaptable to a wide range of conditions. In Caldwell’s view, the ideal ski technician is as much engineer and artist as they are actuary. “Robust solutions limit the risk of sending you in the wrong direction.”
“Wax with fluoro compounds occupied a big part of the whole pie when it came to ski performance,” Caldwell had said previously. His expectation when the US moved to eliminate fluoros from the wax slice of the pie two seasons ago was in line with many ski technicians. “I figured was that we weren’t going to accommodate for the lack of fluoros,” he said. “All we did by eliminating fluoros was make the comparative importance of everything else bigger.”
The key problems to which fluoros served as a solution were twofold. Fluoros resisted water better than any other compound. Fluoros were also better at helping to keep base-clogging dirt away. Those properties came from a complex interaction of chemical, ski, and snow. When applied to a ski, the chemical differentiation of fluorocarbons from a standard polyethylene ski base meant they formed a “top-coat,” not mixing with the other base wax treatments that helped change the bulk properties of the base. That fluorocarbon top-coat was extremely hydrophobic, which helped discourage water-on-water friction in wetter snow conditions most often found around or above freezing. The fluoro top-coat also abraded with dirt that otherwise would be picked up by the ski base, lending to the sensation of “durability” from skiers. In attempting to replace the water- and dirt-repellency offered by fluoros, ski technicians have most often looked at other slices of the overall solution “pie” to re-produce those qualities.
The initial expectation from Caldwell was that skiers would look to ski selection and base grind as factors readily available to assist in finding a solution. “When it comes to that, it’s played out 100% as I predicted it would” he said. “We’re selling way more skis, and grinding way more skis [at Caldwell Sport]. There’s a lot more active testing of hand structures.”
In particular, skiers are looking to add more specialized skis to their fleets in the conditions in which fluoros once excelled. Higher camber skis—skis that ride higher above the snow and often have less prolonged surface run times than comparative skis—can help in having skis not pick up as much dirt. Base Grinds and hand structures, especially “V” shaped chevrons and deeper linear rills, can help channel water away from a ski base in wet conditions.
The push out to the ski itself, and grind selection, has led to a new dynamic in race day solutions. “In the past, you could show up with an inappropriate camber and get those skis into the game in the right conditions by using fluoros,” said Caldwell. “Now, showing up with the wrong ski or wrong hand structure is not doable. You’re unable to compensate with a great wax solution.
The dynamic of not being able to wax your way out of a mis-matched ski has come as a result of what Caldwell sees in the selection of new fluoro-free waxes that have been offered on the market.
“I’ve had to revise my expectations around the wax itself,” he said. “I knew we couldn’t replicate the performance of fluorocarbon chemistry, but thought that the difference between the teams that could test application methods and products ad nauseam and those who couldn’t would be emphasized. As it’s turned out, it has felt like many of the solutions just hit the ceiling for performance at about the same place.”
The result has been twofold. For one, it takes less resources to reach that lower ceiling of performance, and it can often be done by waxes from a much lower price point than the $150-200 fluoro blocks that used to contribute to a race day ski build. There are also more ways to get to an overall ski solution that precludes having found a particular wax product selection and application. Hence, the turn towards ski, grind, and structure selection for many skiers.
Caldwell sees a particular pressure point in the ski industry given the way many fluoro-free waxes have hit a similar performance ceiling, often at wildly unreliable price points: “Some of the big companies were very quick to introduce fluoro-free lines in an attempt to make a new market follow old rules.”
“The price points on those first fluoro-free products reflected that the big wax companies knew that there was a high tolerance high price points among consumers,” Caldwell said. “The thing that gets kind of lost is that those consumer tolerances were built around wax solutions that re-defined the sport. That’s what those 30-gram Swix Cera F vials did in the late 1980s. They were definitely revolutionary. We’re currently in a place now though, where a nominally $1 per application wax job can beat a $10 per application wax job, and after a while, that’s just going to frustrate consumers.”
Caldwell views the muddy value proposition offered by new fluoro-free waxes as contributing to a cultural shift away from the “essentially technical” nature of nordic skiing. “It’s creating an environment where the incentive is stronger than ever to control the role waxing places in the whole solution on race day.” That chiefly includes wax protocols, often modeled after the one introduced by Rocky Mountain Nordic in 2019 that now are enforced across a host of junior and collegiate circuits in the United States. “If we assume that on any given day, without fluoro, there is a certain amount of speed available,” said Caldwell, “[Then] by limiting the role wax plays, you’re decreasing the amount of creativity that can be brought to bear in getting to that total speed available. You end up with more of a disparity than you would have by allowing wax to be brought into the picture.” FasterSkier previously covered the discussion surrounding competitive and technical balance at play in wax protocols here; however skiers might form opinions on where the technical aspect of skiing meets its competitive culture, Caldwell was careful to point out that having those opinions is one of the essential beauties of the sport: “I was pretty young when skating came into the picture,” Caldwell said. “People lost their minds like it was going to change the sport beyond recognition, but what happened? There’s a dialectic that’s healthy, and we ended up with a sport that still includes classic skiing, and even there, a ‘classic skiing’ that is pretty advanced from what they were trying to preserve, right?”
“Progress is always going to be there,” Caldwell said. “And trying to halt progress is a bad idea… but that doesn’t mean you don’t try to steer progress.”
On the contrary, the gyre of new ideas and new technologies spinning the sport forward keeps Caldwell, a seasoned-ski expert among seasoned ski experts, excited some fifty years into the sport. He hopes it will keep you excited, too. In that regard, he leads by pure example. In the brave new world catalyzed by fluoro-free, he sees a broad horizon to chart out skiers’ relationship to how they view their skis. He spins visions on how the World Cup could start promoting the technical aspects of the sport, broadcasting wax tests and highlighting ski profiles the way F1 motorsport does. He can rattle off, with passion, a broad architecture to incentivize ski companies to start producing their best skis for all skiers. “Imagine a world where Fischer had to produce a 50th percentile ski that Johannes Hoesflot Klaebo could win on!”
For Caldwell, all of it comes back to a deeply rooted experience in a nordic community he loves. “One of the really cool things about the US is that the nordic community is quite open, uncharacteristically open, compared to other countries. It’s full of a lot of good people, and I think that culture is, at present, one of the most sophisticated cultures in the world when it comes to ski innovation.” As to where are we in the fluoro-free world, two seasons in? “You mean in a world where you can’t brute force your way to good solutions with more resources?” asked Caldwell. “Well, it’s a world that puts a premium on collaboration and creativity? Turns out we’ve been pretty good at that for a long time over here.”
Ben Theyerl
Ben Theyerl was born into a family now three-generations into nordic ski racing in the US. He grew up skiing for Chippewa Valley Nordic in his native Eau Claire, Wisconsin, before spending four years racing for Colby College in Maine. He currently mixes writing and skiing while based out of Crested Butte, CO, where he coaches the best group of high schoolers one could hope to find.
