Turn Phases Are Places
On Thursdays after a day of watching skiers ski around the mountain, Cert III candidates watched videos of more skiers.
It was the particular late of ski towns, when the lifts have stopped spinning but the day hasn’t quite let go. In the Village kids’ center, we folded ourselves onto chairs meant for children—too small for most of us, knees up, backs rounding, no one comfortable but no one admitting it. Someone filled bowls with Goldfish and passed them around like rations.
The trainer fussed with the projector like a substitute math teacher. Then, under fluorescent light, we began.
Movement analysis at the Cert III level has a way of clarifying things by muddying them. The lexicon of how bodies and skis perform their official ballet is mechanical, not moral.
“The skis tell the truth,” the writers of manuals and rubrics of the Professional Ski Instructors of America insist. What they really mean is, it is your bodies that try to lie.
Out on the hill, with real students, the language always feels simpler than the dense codex of sagittal planes mitigating centripetal forces. A student’s edges either hold or they don’t. You can hear the clean, high hiss of a ski set on edge, or the loud loose grate when it isn’t.
“Pizza!” you scream for dear life as the body locks and careens toward the fence. “Piiiiiiiiiiizza!!”
No parsing required. Just the peeling of Gore-Tex from fencing and the occasional wiping of tears.
Inside, though, the words always get in the way.
This week, the Irish national team performed dynamic short-radius turns. The video looped at half-speed. The trainer played it until someone emerged bold enough to speak.
It was a young instructor from Peak 9. He’d gone for the exam a few weeks back and found himself unsuccessful. He leaned against the cubbies stacked at the back of the room, still wearing his backpack, like a veteran returned to basic training after seeing combat.
“Um, the skier initiates his turns in the backseat. He’s aft in all three phases.”
All eyeballs rolled toward him like snowballs down the bunny hill. Uh-oh.
Movement analysis is the banality of precision. The dialect is exacting and faintly absurd. One does not say, “the skier is aft.” One says: at initiation, the center of mass moves aft of the base of support, limiting the ability to direct pressure along the length of the ski.
“Let me stop you right there, son.” The trainer—who’d been listening with the patience of someone accustomed to coaching three-year-olds—interrupted.“I fail a candidate as soon as I hear them speak about turn phases as verbs.”
The room imploded in silence. The projector whirred and some laughter drifted in from the ice rink nearby. Someone shifted; a boot sole squeaked faintly against linoleum. It was so white-out quiet you could hear a snowflake fizzle in hell.
“You don’t initiate the turn. It’s at initiation.”
It was, on its face, a small correction. But it carried the weight of a larger ideology. The minutiae, the semantics, in PSIA, they are precisely the point.
To speak of initiation as a verb is to imply control, authorship—an act a skier imposes on the mountain.
To speak of it as a place is to acknowledge something more existential: the turn unfolds in spite of you. The turn is ideal. It’s a Platonic Form that exists in a perfect arc apropos of nothing. But not you, the skier. You, with your bum knee and tight hips, are all too real. Real means fallible. As in, likely to fall—over your words, your crisscrossed tips, your boots on the frozen puddles laced throughout the parking lot at the gondola’s end.
Movement analysis’ purpose is to make you understand how you suck in relation to the turn, not the other way around.
At initiation.
In shaping.
Through finish.
“Ski–snow interaction” is best understood in prepositions, not commands.
On a warm January day, a training in Vail begins with a warning: rotary inaccuracies can cause fore/aft issues. It is delivered without emphasis, but once heard, it is everywhere. A slight twist at the top of the turn, a subtle pivot of the feet, and the skier is displaced. The skis scrape instead of carve. When pressure arrives late, the pelvis is usually the culprit.
“Not square,” the trainer, a different one from the one who loves prepositions, says. “Separation, not symmetry. Now, let’s try and task ourselves into good skiing.”
At the finish of the turn, she has us sideslip all the way down Pickeroon. Not as a rest, but as a reference. The skis flatten, the edges release, and there’s that familiar, dry whisper of bases against snow. Alignment of the center of mass to the outside ski is the goal. Lead it with the inside knee. The skis slide where they had once gripped. The toe of the downhill boot seeks the middle of the uphill arch. Micromanaging tip lead feels small, almost trivial, until it doesn’t. The sound changes, the sensation changes, and the whole system reorganizes around that point.
The body resists; the task insists.
There are images, occasionally. The ski is the bow, the snow the string, the outside leg the arm drawing the arrow back. You feel the tension build—not metaphorically, but physically, in the muscles, in the contact with the snow—and then you release. The turn snaps cleanly through. Less an action than a location you can pinpoint with an arrow.
Indoors again, this time at home on Zoom, the tone sharpens. The task is performance mediums. A mise en abyme: your spoken performance of the ski’s performance of your body’s performance.
“I’d like to see the skier continue flexing their outside leg through finish.” I say. “And develop more counter all the way through shaping to unlock more ski performance.”
The structure is simple, and unforgiving: I see this, and this is causing this. What I would rather see is…
“Yes,” the trainer agrees in a way I know I missed the mark. “But now connect the outcome to the ski performance and body performance. This skier’s tendency in movement pattern is to move from the hip. She gets a high edge angle early and cuts off rotation. Try again.”
I try again. And again. Over time, halting shifts closer to fluency. Initiation becomes a place whose boundary to shaping is as porous as shaping is to finish. They each last an infinity and are inextricably linked. I arm myself with PSIA words, none of them mine.
Your eyes memorize what you ski. And then, almost without noticing—
the verbs disappear.