Wax Wars: Inside the Battle of Mad Science Behind Every Olympic Ski Racer

Ski racing doesn't always fall solely on the shoulders of the athletes. Sometimes, having the right person waxing and tuning your skis can make a world of difference. Pexel photo.

Underneath the winter Olympics alpine racing venues, under the crowds and the busy streets of PyeongChang, under the cameras and cowbells, there is a whole world you don’t see—a giant underground parking lot, separated into rooms by plywood. And it’s here, before the racers even click into their skis, that races are often won and lost.

In these 10-by-10-foot rooms lit by fluorescent construction lights, ski technicians prep the skis before the race. If the wax guys nail it, it’s up to the racer to take the fair shot and run with it. But if they don’t it, well, even the best performance can’t make up for the lost time of a slow ski. It looks like real mad-scientist alchemy—guys in respirators, applying all kinds of mysterious liquids, solids, powders, and sprays to the bases of skis before brushing, scraping, and starting again. But behind all that mystery is a lot of solid data and pure experience, plus a dash of good old gut intuition.

But the real work begins long before you even get to the wax room, says Matt Schiller, who was a ski technician for Andrew Weibrecht (among others) at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Techs have to weed out their best skis first—for each athlete in each discipline at each venue—which means taking thousands of runs on hundreds of skis.

“You have a few different models of skis in each quiver,” Schiller says. “And different skis work for different areas, different venues, different race courses, and snow conditions. A ski that works at Lake Louise is not going to work at Beaver Creek. You have a race pair that’s been cultured and proven and is the racer’s favorite pair, and then you’ve got a couple of B pairs that are real close.”

Early season testing happens in Chile and New Zealand–as well as on glaciers around the world–where athletes, factory reps, and techs all run the skis on a test track without gates just to test for sheer speed.

Weibrecht and Schiller made a perfect pairing in Super-G, Weibrecht's specialty. US Ski & Snowboard photo.

“Skis get faster by running them in,” Schiller says. “You do open, mellow runs, and get these skis on snow, then you re-wax and re-brush them. When a ski is ground new, it needs to be cultured. Part of that is burning it slightly on the snow, having the opportunity to put in a lot of heavy brushing, and then some deep cycles of different temperature and properties of waxes. We use sandpaper and a whole myriad of tricks to break down that tire tread, or structure, so they’re a little slicker.”

By October 2010, Schiller had developed 20 fast skis for each discipline.

“I had two athletes on the World Cup, speed-specific guys, and between two guys I traveled with 40 pairs of speed skis—20 super-G skis, and 20 downhill skis,” Schiller says. “That meant getting dozens of burrito bags of skis, plus t­uning equipment and personal equipment, plus backup boots through customs. I had three full flatbed luggage carts in the airport.”

Then comes the training days at the race venue. “Here’s where the magic happens,” says Schiller. During inspection, coaches, wax companies, and brand reps make course condition reports. The techs go down with the athlete and take their own snow temperatures and discuss daily conditions. The flat parts of the course are the most important in terms of nailing the wax—because that’s where the friction coefficient becomes the biggest factor.

“Take Beaver Creek, which has, like, a 23-second top section,” Schiller says. “That’s the race right there. Everything else after that is ridiculously steep double fall-line. The only thing I can do is get my guy to that split as fast as possible. The rest is up to him.”

Conversely, Vancouver’s course was going to be about the wax the whole way down because of the especially challenging conditions, Schiller says. There was a huge difference in snow conditions—11 degrees Celsius—from the top to the finish.

“The top had new, tight, small fresh snow crystals,” says Schiller. “And then it went to manmade, injected, and springy, and then at the bottom it was full-on spring maritime glop.”

The techs hunkered down in the underground plywood rooms, while factory reps circled to every country’s wax rooms and recommended a certain base grind—which determines the skis’ base structure—for the venue. (Cold, dry snow needs a smoother base; warm, wet snow needs a deeper structure.) The wax companies, the coaches, the ski companies, and the techs all take temperatures of the snow and evaluate conditions, and most countries share their information—except the Austrians, that is.

“They hide their stuff,” Schiller says. “But everyone wants to succeed, and at the end it’s still up to the guy at the start.”

Then, on downhill training day, Weibrecht runs the course at about 90 percent on a pair of B skis, which are almost perfect but not quite as fast as the A pair, says Schiller. “After the training run, you get a massive report with seven different time splits down the course.” The coaches, techs, and athletes then convene to analyze the data and figure out what needs to be tweaked in terms of gear and wax.

Weibrecht at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics after a surprise performance. NPR photo.

“You start validating your choices and qualifying. You have great hindsight at that point,” Schiller says. “All of these variables have to be factored. Change the ski? Change the boot? Push harder at the start? Speed is a veterans’ sport—it takes lifer technicians and veteran athletes. There are just too many nuances.”

The athletes essentially have the last say when it comes to what skis and boots they feel best on, Schiller says. And how perceptive are they when it gets down to fractions of a second?

“Well, they either feel fast and comfortable, or they fought it. Some will take feedback. Or some are strong-willed or pig headed,” Schiller says. Only a very select few of the latter—the guys who choose to disregard their coaches’ and techs’ advice—succeed: “Bode [Miller], Daron [Rahlves], and Hermann [Maier] had balls and could pull it off,” Schiller says.

After the training runs, it’s time for Schiller to prepare the final A skis for the super-G race, to be held before the downhill. Vancouver was a particularly challenging race for the ski techs. There were delays and cancellations due to haphazard weather and conditions, so the course was changing rapidly. “On super-G race day, it was getting colder, the course had been sitting for days, getting glassier and harder, it was getting slipped, they were throwing salt …. The temperature gradient was throwing a lot of people off,” Schiller says.

So he built the wax on the ski like a layered cake, thinking about the bottom of the course first, because by the time the athlete reaches the bottom, the first few layers of waxes will be long gone. He chose a high fluorocarbon iron-on wax for warm snow, and then applied a powder overlay for the middle of the course, a rub-on for the upper, and a spray for the very top.

“There are different timing coefficients: The spray lasts eight to 15 seconds, the rub-on a little longer, maybe 30 seconds, and the powder will hold about a minute,” Schiller says. “It’s going to peel away as you go through the sections.”

After some last-minute inspections and tweaks, he is done.

“It’s race day, and I have my ski ready to go. I only have one guy who made the super-G race—Andrew Weibrecht. We had gone up and we knew what the course was doing. I knew the temps and I had the ski picked, and he loved it. I was very happy. The ski was wrapped up and I put the skis into the gondola rack. The door opens and I put my foot in, and I don’t know what happened, but I was like, it’s not done yet!” Shiller says. “I walked off the gondola, grabbed the race skis, and stripped off all my shit. I put one more layer of powder on top that ski and brushed it 15 more times. Something in my gut said, ‘Just do a little bit more.’ That’s the magic. The ski on paper was exactly the way it should have been. But something in my gut said, ‘I can do better. This is the fucking Olympics.’”

When Weibrecht saw him at the start, he said, “I didn’t see you up here this morning,” Schiller says. “I said, ‘I know, I got it.’ He said, ‘It got a little firmer today.’ I said, ‘I know I got it.’” Weibrecht was running third, which was a very early start number.

“It was pretty warm; we were digging down into the snow so the guys could stand in it, and we were covering their boots up with snow so they didn’t get softer in the heat.” Schiller put the skis in the shade, near the start tent instead of outside in the elements, to keep the ski as cool as possible. “It’s going to have some nano resistance if it’s not harmonically in tune with the snow,” he says.

Then it was time for Weibrecht to ski his run. Weibrecht typically hovered in the middle of the pack with his results—ranking 16^th or 17^th. But at Vancouver, he posted the fastest time.

A young Weibrecht (left) and Schiller (right) celebrate their surprise Super-G bronze at Vancouver. Matt Schiller photo.

“He had an incredible run,” Schiller says. But it was early, and most of the best athletes were still to come—they usually get seeded with middle bibs, so they can get course feedback from the first runners. “And then there was a condition course hold. Someone might have fell, maybe there was a gate out. Then Bode came down and beat him by three hundredths. And then a bunch of other guys started stacking in. Andrew was still second, and the next seven guys were all within two tenths of the same second. It was insane. The course got warmer, and [Aksel] Svindal came down and beat Bode by another three tenths,” Schiller says.

After all the athletes finished, Weibrecht—and Schiller—came in third overall, clinching the bronze medal.

“He was 24 years old, “ Schiller says. “It was his first medal; his first time on podium.”

It was one of Schiller’s proudest moments of his career.

“He had the right wax, the right ski, the right attitude. And if you want to talk pure wax,” Schiller says, “he had the best time.”

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stash member Kim Beekman