Sea to Ski: An athlete's adventures, and the dawn of the modern ski boot

Book Synopsis: The man who made plastic ski boots work well is Sven Coomer. Before 1969, plastic boots were narrow, badly padded and painful. Barely covering the ankle, they offered inadequate leverage to fully use the new generation of fiberglass slalom skis. The term “Lange bang” described the common experience of the original plastic boots.Born in Sydney, Coomer is the son of an Australian father and Swedish mother. He became the youngest competitor at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics (in modern pentathlon), then went on to study engineering in Sweden, where he learned to ski Alpine. A brilliant athlete, he trained with the French ski team, then emigrated to the United States where he coached young racers (Tamara McKinney was one of his kids) and directed the PSIA experimental ski school at Solitude, Utah. Doug Pfeiffer at Skiing Magazine hired him as a ski tester.In 1968, working for Nordica, Coomer set out to create the ideal slalom racing boot. Beginning in 1971, he launched a series of revolutionary boots that established the pattern for every high-performance ski boot built since then, beginning with the high-top leather Nordica Sapporo and plastic Olympic, then the Astral Slalom, Grand Prix, GT, Meteor and Comp 3. The boots he created fit precisely and comfortably, and introduced the removable liner that adapted readily to the skier’s foot. He created the integral high-back “spoiler” to set the ankle in its strongest position, and the high tongue to balance that stance and enable full leverage in powering modern race skis. He designed three-piece (“open throat”) race boots, including models still in production today. He invented the power strap that closes the cuff on all modern high-performance boots. All these innovations were immediately successful in World Cup racing and were imitated by boot factories around the world.Coomer went on to invent the custom-built footbed, and trained several generations of retailers in the new art of custom boot fitting.Sven Coomer brought comfort and ski-control power to millions of skiers worldwide. Over a 50- year career he created the boots used by Alpine champions from Pacho Fernández Ochoa and Tamara McKinney to Marcel Hirscher and Mikaela Shiffrin. He showed the way forward for an entire industry. This is his story, in his own words.