Skis before the SCX had almost always used a shape that was slightly curved inward on the sides, typically by 7 millimetres (0.28 in) compared to a straight line running from tip to tail.
[1][2][3] The first true downhill skis, made in Telemark, Norway by Sondre Norheim,[4] were handmade from single pieces of hardwood and featured a relatively modest sidecut of about 4 to 5 mm.
Throughout, little engineering effort had been spent on considering the ski shape, as other issues like torsional stiffness and "chattering" were problems that needed to be solved.
Taking a pair of the company's standard hickory Rocket skis, they cut away wood until they produced a 15 millimetres (0.59 in) sidecut.
Hiatt and Groswold's experiment required such a deep sidecut that the waist had little vertical stiffness, another problem for the design.
[7] The Backhill was extremely low-tech in comparison to contemporary ski designs, consisting largely of a sheet of plywood.
[8] Experiments with slightly greater sidecut on skis did appear during this period, including the Head Yahoo and especially the Atomic Powder Plus.
[7] Further developments followed due to changes in competitive giant slalom, as the gates were moved further apart and resulted in much more turning.
Despite reports that these skis were easier to turn, they were considered specialty items and the designs offered only to the race and performance markets.
They solved this by cutting the ski in half longitudinally, leaving the curve only on the inside edge, which powers the turn.
The company produced 150 pairs to demonstrate at the SIA trade show in 1986, but no one purchased the odd-looking asymmetrical "Albert" design.
[9] Jurij Franko[a] graduated from the University of Ljubljana in 1983 with a degree in engineering and in 1985[clarification needed] and took a position at Elan in 1987.
The new design was an immediate hit on the local race market; in its first outing with the ski, the Elan team took the top eight of ten places.
[11] The company sold it across Europe, but found it difficult to break into a market dominated by the large players, Salomon and Rossignol.
They invariably reported dramatic results, with intermediate skiers able to produce carving turns easily, even in poor conditions that experts would normally find difficult.
[6] Additionally, as was discovered by Groswold and Hiatt half a century earlier, with so much force being applied at the end of the skis, they had to be much stronger under the waist.
[9] The solution was simply to make the ski considerably shorter,[6] reducing the moment arm and counteracting these effects.
[1] By 1994 a number of smaller companies had introduced parabolic skis of their own, including the Atomic S-Ski and similar Kneissl Ergo (which developed from Olin's earlier models).
[13] It became clear that skis should have always been shaped this way, and one designer later noted that "It turned out that everything we thought we knew for forty years was wrong.