Ski Racing - November 21, 2011

TIME MACHINE
NEW HAMPSHIRE’S SPORT THOMA SKI SHOP BEEFS UP ITS RACE
PROGRAM WITH WINTERSTEIGER BY HANK MCKEE
Back to the Future

Ready to go.

LINCOLN, N.H. — Walking in the front door of the Sport Thoma Ski Shop here leads to a tidy and very full ski shop full of new apparel. The next room has recreational skis. And above the door to the third room is a sign that reads, “Race Room.” For one immersed in ski racing there is a comfort that comes with walking through that door. It smells like wax. Jovial people are moving quickly. This third room is chock-full of race gear: skis, boots, poles, helmets, armor. It is not a limited selection. Every major competition brand is stocked, plus a couple of new ones, like Dodge boots and Bomber skis, both U.S. products.

If the immersion has been of a lengthy sort, the memory might go

HANK MCKEE

back to Ed Chase, the man who tuned skis for the Mahre brothers. He’s instrumental in the Sport Thoma race program and points around this room as he says: “This is all retail race product. There is no, what we would call, consumer public product in this at all.” But it is through the next door where things come sharply into focus. It’s the main portion of the service department and is dominated by a huge Wintersteiger ski prep machine, a quarter of a million dollars worth of high-tech grinding. The machine is just a few weeks old and has already seen a goodly amount of work. In a long narrow storage area behind the Wintersteiger are batches of skis, grouped by race program, ready for pick-up. The pack for Waterville Valley is

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out front. Down the narrow back room are skis batched and ready for the race programs of Burke Mountain, Nashoba, Franconia, Bretton Woods and Ragged Mountain. “And we’re just starting our pile for Loon,” says Chase. “They’re just coming in today.” There are hundreds of pairs of high-end race skis in this room. It’s a bit mind-numbing to consider.

Sport Thoma has been around a long time, founded by Chris Thoma three decades ago. The focus on racing is more recent, and the escalation of that focus is fresh.