could carry much wider sidecuts, and that such a sidecut resulted in excellent turn performance, little came of this development. The snowboard market was ignored by the major ski companies through the 1970s and 80s. Experiments with slightly greater sidecut on skis did appear during this period, including the Head Yahoo and especially the Atomic Powder Plus. Further developments followed due to changes in competitive giant slalom, as the gates were moved further apart and resulted in much more turning. K2 responded with the GS Race with a 10 mm sidecut, and several similar designs followed. In spite of reports that these skis were easier to turn, they were considered specialty items and the designs offered only to the race and performance markets. One particularly notable experiment was made at Olin during the early 1980s. In 1984, one of the Olin executives asked ski designer Frank Meatto if it were possible to make a beginner's ski that would make skiing easier to learn. Meatto and co-designer Ed Pilpel decided to experiment with a radical sidecut as a way of improving turns. They designed a ski with a 31 mm sidecut, but it had tips that were 128 mm wide and they wouldn't fit into their presses. They solved this by cutting the ski in half longitudinally, leaving the curve only on the inside edge, which powers the turn. The result was effectively one-half of the parabolic designs that would follow. The ski was so narrow underfoot that additional platforms had to be added to mount the bindings. The company produced 150 pairs to demonstrate at the SIA trade show in 1986, but no one purchased the odd-looking asymmetrical "Albert" design. Parabolic skis The company that finally drove the evolution of ski design was Elan of Slovenia. Designers at Elan produced an experimental design with screws that could be adjusted to produce different amounts of sidecut, and asked members of the company ski team to try them at different settings. This quickly demonstrated that a radically increased sidecut around 22 mm clearly improved turning performance. A series of test skis followed, which the Elan team immediately started racking up win after win on in giant slalom events. In 1993 a number of these "Sidecut Extreme", or "SCX", skis were sent to the US for testing. The results on student skiing was dramatic, and the company began designing their skis specifically for