Reports: Finnish Inventors Devise Secret, Tape-Like Kickwax Solution Superior in Wet Conditions

By Gavin Kentch

I apologize for the clickbait-adjacent header here, but, well, you read these headlines and tell me how you would in good faith blurb this piece:

NRK: “Mysterious invention could revolutionize skiing: secret testing in Norway. Athletes must sign non-disclosure agreements and the testing is top secret. Two Finnish brothers hope to revolutionize skiing.”

Expressen: “The Finnish enigma that eludes an entire skiing world. They really just wanted to help a bunch of exercisers — but accidentally discovered something that could change an entire sport.”

YLE: “Here is the top-secret project that paved the way for Johanna Matintalo’s scandal. Johanna Matintalo was close to winning in Falun with the help of a new invention. Now she can finally tell what the top-secret ski project is all about.”

(You can read the original articles, in auto-translation, here (NRK), here (Expressen), and here (YLE).)

So there is clearly something going on deep in the Finnish forests, which, if early results are replicable, could have a significant impact on future classic races held in wet or humid conditions (World Champs in Trondheim come to mind). The Finnish brothers behind the potential breakthrough, Esa and Pasi Vironen, feel that they have something big on their hands, but are extremely wary of saying too much so long as their patent application is still pending, lest competitors become able to ape their invention before it is protected.

Oh yeah, and Johanna Matintalo claimed a breakthrough World Cup distance podium last March while racing on classic skis with this preparation underfoot, making up huge amounts of time on winner Kerttu Niskanen over the second half of the race while plowing through a wet, heavy snowfall.

Then, when asked what is generally a softball question about why her skis were so good — “I’d like to thank my wax techs” may be a trope, but it’s also true — Matintalo clammed up. She revealed only weeks later that she had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the company behind her wax job, and so was barred from saying even that she was racing on new kickwax-like technology, let alone what that technology was.

Interested yet?

I don’t want to “if you’d like to find out more you’ll have to read the book” you here, but I also want to respect the original reporting done by the above three outlets and not simply blockquote large portions of others’ work. So you really should read the articles for yourself.

That said, if you’d like my summary of what’s going on here, augmented with some original reporting on my part in the links, here it is:

• Two media-shy Finnish brothers, Esa and Pasi Vironen, started a company, Custom Ski, some time ago. (You can find their website here, though it focuses solely on their coaching offerings. Their news page blurbs a number of upcoming training camps; it does not mention anything about having potentially created a killer app for classic waxing.) The pair was previously in the news in fall 2019, when they first popularized a method for retrofitting old waxable classic skis with post-market skins so that skiers could have skin skis without buying a new pair. The Vironens have therefore clearly been tinkering in this area for a while now.
• During the winter of 2023/2024 the brothers were working on a refinement of their original invention, still with the recreational-skier market in mind. “But when they tested their new product” in wet conditions, Expressen writes, “they suddenly realized that they had created something completely different. More precisely: what all the world’s elite skiers want.”
• The new technology soon made its way to the skis below the feet of the Finnish national team. It was first tested at the World Cup level, per Finnish outlet YLE, in Lahti in early March.
• In at least one race last year, the 10km classic in Falun on the penultimate day of the 2023/2024 World Cup season, at least one athlete, Johanna Matintalo, raced on this new invention, to great effect. “In Falun, I knew that there would be skis that were treated in this way. They showed themselves best in tests so it was an easy choice,” Matintalo told YLE after the fact. It was Matintalo’s first individual World Cup podium in a distance race (though she had been fifth several other times, so don’t read too much into that).
• Conditions for the Falun race were warm and wet. Official results describe the weather as “heavy snow,” with an air temp of +0.2 C and a snow temp of –0.1 C. Pretty sloppy, and, to put it mildly, challenging conditions in which to find a workable kickwax solution.

Here is a photo of women’s winner Kerttu Niskanen in that race. It is snowing, and I’m gonna use a technical term here so bear with me, pretty damn hard.

• Some other countries did not have particularly good skis that day. In a trio of humorously frank auto-translated responses compiled by Expressen, Maja Dahlqvist said of the Falun 10km, “These are the worst skis I have ever ridden.” Emma Ribom notes, “It was like riding on sandpaper.” Frida Karlsson inveighs, “This was piss.”
  
• Back to the magic skis. Time passes. Some details emerge. Swedish head coach Anders Svanebo and athlete William Poromaa are permitted to try the new technology at Sognefjellet in June. The Vironens accompany them to ensure that neither man looks under the skis.

(For perspective, on World Cup classic race days skis are typically swept away from the finish with alacrity even when all the wax teams are presumably working with commercially available products; there is a great deal of proprietary information out there. On the domestic circuit, some programs (read: APU) will have coaches greet athletes at the finish and march the skis back to the safety of the wax trailer, base side down; other programs seem less concerned on this front.)

• “What are they doing now? Nobody actually knows,” Svanebo tells Expressen following his experience on the June snowfields. He characterizes it as “a bit of skin 2.0, a further development. But this is still not [a skin ski].” For his part, Poromaa dutifully abstains from inspecting the bases. “I can say that it was interesting!” Poromaa tells the paper, according to an auto-translation. (I am desperately curious here whether Svanebo, like, skied behind his athlete and tried to sneak a peek while Poromaa was striding, but the article is silent on this front.)

So what the heck is actually going on here on the bottom of these skis? This line, from YLE in April, quoting Pasi Vironen, is the most that anyone seems to know right now:

“It is not about herding [Finnish vallning, translated elsewhere as ‘control’] because no chemicals are involved in the process,” said Pasi Vironen. “It also has nothing to do with grinding, patterns, or that we would make the bottom rougher, but something completely different. It repels dirt very well. Perhaps it is best to simply call it just treatment of the attachment zone at this stage.”

The YLE reporter on scene was allowed to touch, but not to look at, the bottom of a ski that had been treated with the Vironens’ method.

“Stuck in the attachment zone was something that looked [sic] like tape and felt very slippery,” wrote YLE, “which of course is important in cross-country skiing. But it remained a mystery how the mysterious innovation offers the attachment a skier needs.”

A mystery indeed.

Next steps: About that patent application

In all three articles the brothers refer to their pending patent application, and to the need to protect their intellectual property until that safeguard is in place.

All the articles state that the brothers Vironen applied for a patent in January 2024. As of yesterday, November 12, there were no results for “Vironen” in the Patent Cooperation Treaty international patents database. And any patents granted including the terms “ski” and “wax” were not this. Finally, and tellingly, there have not been follow-up articles in any publication titled, like, “Finnish Waxing Secret Revealed!” While it is hard to prove a negative, I feel comfortable concluding that there has not yet been a ruling on the patent application.

Next steps, ft. a detour into statutory interpretation

The rules governing the use of ski equipment in FIS races are set forth in the Specifications for Competition document, which you can find here. The portion of these rules governing the base of a cross-country racing ski is article 2.2.4. This subsection reads, in full:

“The entire width of the running surface can be smooth or slightly grooved lengthwise. With the exception of the running groove, however, the level must be constant in the entire length and width. Climbing aids in the form of scale patterns or step patterns are permitted. Devices that are activated by any energy other than the competitor’s own muscular power are not permitted.”

This provision, on my reading, permits fishscales in World Cup racing (lol), and does not explicitly say anything about waxing. Waxing is discussed most directly in a different document, The International Ski Competition Rules, universally referred to as ICR.

ICR article 222.8 proscribes the use of fluoros: “Use of fluorinated wax or tuning products containing fluorine is prohibited for all FIS disciplines and levels. Fluorinated wax can be a competitive advantage and its use in competition will result in disqualification.” Other ICR provisions discuss the use or misuse of fluoros and testing therefor.

On my reading, there is no other discussion in the ICR document of the types of wax that may be applied to a ski base. The closest this document gets is article 343.12.7, which states that waxing, structuring, or cleaning during a race is forbidden, except that athletes may scrape, or even rewax, their own skis during classic distance races to remove built-up snow.

There is one other rule governing the introduction of new equipment into FIS races, ICR article 222.

Subsection 222.3 of this rule states that “All new developments in the field of competition equipment must be approved in principle by the FIS.” The following paragraph, ICR 222.4, states, “New developments must be submitted by May 1st … at the latest, for the following season. The first year new developments can only be approved provisionally for the following season and must be finally confirmed prior to the subsequent competition season.”

As a simple matter of logic, if the Vironens did not stumble onto this breakthrough until well into the 2023/2024 race season (hence the patent application submitted in January 2024), they did not submit it as a new development prior to May 1, 2023. I also find it extremely unlikely that secretive innovators working to safeguard an invention submitted full information about this to the FIS Committee for Competition Equipment earlier this year, but that is just me speculating here.

I have email requests out to FIS regarding whether or not this new method was submitted to FIS prior to May 1, 2024, for official use in the 2024/2025 season, or whether in the alternative this new tape-like affixion method is not a “new development[] in the field of competition equipment” under the meaning of the rules. I will update this article accordingly.

Finally, this dynamic may make some readers think of the last several years’ worth of “shoe doping” in athletics, specifically allegations that some athletes have at times competed in high-profile races using shoes that were not yet available, either commercially to the masses or even just to their fellow competitors.

For the sake of comparison: The current version of the Athletic Shoe Regulations document adopted by World Athletics, née IAAF, states that if an athlete wishes to wear a new shoe in a World Athletics event or at the Olympics, that shoe must have been generally commercially available for at least a month prior to the start of the competition (art. 13.2). (Yes, World Athletics is allowed to ask for proof of a new super shoe actually being available, see Appendix 4, para. 2.)

An athlete is allowed to wear a “development shoe,” which need not be as broadly available, for up to a year, but (a) has to tell World Athletics about this in advance and (b) cannot do so at high-level events (art. 8.2–.3).

This is all just an argument by analogy; it literally involves different athletes with different equipment in a different sport subject to a different governing body. I am truly not trying to presage any conclusion here regarding the Finnish waxers. But if you are curious how athletics has dealt with this dynamic over the past several years, there you have it.

You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, last season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.