Why your tails wash out

Your tails wash out at the end of a turn: the back of the ski slides sideways when you expected it to hold. Forums blame both directions, too far back and too far forward. This page shows the forward half.

Slide the stance from centred to far forward. Centred, the lab puts about 7% of the load on the tail at the finish of the turn, and its edge holds with some room to spare. At 30% forward it is about 4% and the tail is marginal. By 50% forward the tail carries about 3% and its edge slides. At full forward it is about 1%, and the tip has gone from 10% of the load to 25%.

Look at what happened. The tail did not do anything wrong. It lost its load. An edge grips because it is pressed into the snow, and a tail with almost nothing on it has almost nothing to grip with. At the end of the turn, when the forces are highest and the ski is on its steepest edge angle, the lightly loaded tail is the first part to let go.

This is the opposite of the back seat, where the tail takes too much load. In the lab, a skier in the back seat does not wash out the tail. The model only finds the forward cause. Forum posters tell stories of both, so the model is telling you about half the picture. Other causes also exist that it cannot see, like pressure on the inside ski, a tail that is pushed rather than carved, or just a patch of ice.

It is also worth remembering that this is a model with one skier, one turn and groomed snow. The numbers say which way things move and roughly where the line is. They do not say where your tail will let go.

The practical read: if your tails wash out at the end of the turn and you tend to ski with your weight on the balls of your feet, reaching for the next turn, try spreading your pressure along the whole foot.