Commentary

State of the Sport: Gear

Talking with Atomic's Jake Strassburger about the constantly evolving world of freeskiing hardgoods

Originally Published: October 13, 2011

Chris McKearinJake Strassburger (center) meeting with Atomic athletes, from left to right: Tim Durtschi, Todd Ligare, Julian Carr, Dana Flahr, Sage Cattabriga-Alosa.

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[Editor's note: Freeskiing as a sport is in a state of flux right now. So here at ESPN Freeskiing, we're taking a hard look at the state of the sport in this new interview series. Stay tuned next Thursday for an interview with Bobby Brown on the state of tricks.]

You won't find many skiers more enthusiastic about what they do than Jake Strassburger. Atomic's 34-year-old jack-of-all-trades holds a rare crossover position in the ski industry: He's directly involved with technical development for the brand's three hardgoods components, and he also helps market its all-star team of freeskiers, including Sage Cattabriga-Alosa, Dana Flahr, Daron Rahlves, Julian Carr and Chris Benchetler. Strassburger, who got his first ski-tech job at age 15, has worked for Atomic since 2002, notably helping the brand shift its priorities from racing to freeskiing over the past five years. Here, he explains where hardgoods have come from and where they're going, how the athletes' input fits in and why there's more pressure to innovate than ever before.

When I came onboard at Atomic, we were manufacturing skis like the Sugar Daddy or Big Daddy, which in their day were pretty progressive. They were wider, stiffer, really high performance. Then the brand started focusing heavily on the racing side of things, which cost us market share as other brands leapt ahead. But since about 2007, we've really shifted gears and tried to focus our relevance on skis that people are having more fun on.

Courtesy photoStrassburger hard at work product testing.

A ski that really turned the brand around was the Bent Chetler. There were a lot of rocker skis coming out at the time, and a lot of skis that were full rocker, but the magic of the Bent Chetler, with the camber underfoot and the sidecut underfoot, is its versatility. You can take that ski in mixed, harder snow, and it's a lot easier and more predictable. It's also going to give you all kinds of flotation -- it's a really surfy feel. I think everyone's going to see modern powder skiing head in that direction.

It's always like, what's next? We have to look at the guys who are out there charging every day to help us stay in front of the new trends. You'll see that in a new ski we're developing for 2012 that was a collaboration between Sage and Dana, kind of merging their styles in a powder ski.

Between the blogging and how quickly information spreads now, it almost seems like people are hungry for something new -- what's the latest, greatest mouse trap -- even more than before. The R&D programs are under quite a bit of pressure.

With touring bindings, the Marker Duke obviously has a lot of traction, and they've kind of got a monopoly. I don't think anyone's going to tour all day on that, but I think you'll see some stuff from the collective group here that will give them a run for their money soon.

If you speak to the industry in general, there's a lot of customization happening with boots, just instant adaptation depending on what you're skiing. And adjustable flex patterns: If you're skiing the pipe, you can have your boots set at a 120 flex, but if you want to ski park or urban, you can set it at a 100 flex. Things like that are becoming more prevalent.

Carbon fiber is still the most innovative material we use. It's amazing the properties you get, between it being really lightweight and having direct energy transfer, and being able to tune it like fiberglass. People can really perceive a high performance or high value in the material. But at the end of the day, it's extremely expensive. And that's prohibitive, especially in the ski industry.

If we were to go back 10 years and you would've told me what skis would look like today, I would've been blown away. It seems like in ski development, there's always been a teeter-totter, where things kind of go all the way in one direction, then they come back. With waist widths in powder skis, we got fatter, fatter, fatter, and you'd see skis come out at 130, 140 millimeters underfoot. And now I feel like they've started to trickle back.

What's next? I don't know. Maybe we'll put rockets on them.