4-20 Explosive turn?

Imagine that you’re skiing very, very fast. Let’s say a high speed GS type of turn, you are in the last section of the curve and your exterior foot is suddenly freed from the ski. No, I’m not talking about the binding pre-releasing, but about your very own boot exploding or better yet, disintegrating. 

I don’t have to tell you that you don’t want that to happen while you’re skiing, and this is why, a few days ago, Head USA just announced a voluntary recall of approximately 1,890 pairs of high-end ski boots across North America. 

The recall comes after reports that the boot’s shell and sole inserts can spontaneously deteriorate and break, potentially turning a smooth run down the mountain into a dangerous fall. The recall specifically impacts the fluorescent yellow materials used in the construction of the boot shell and sole. 

According to the brand, these components can become brittle and crack, compromising the structural integrity of the boot. While the thought of our boot disintegrating mid-carve is enough to give any skier pause, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) confirmed that no injuries have been reported to date. 

In my years in the boot business, we had a few warranty claims for broken boots, but from what I can remember the breakage happened during storage. Head is moving proactively to pull the remaining stock and alert owners before the "deterioration" leads to a documented accident. 

The affected boots were sold nationwide at specialized ski retailers and through various online platforms. Given that these boots have been on the market for over a decade (spanning from late 2015 through early 2026), many skiers may still have these boots. Just check yours if they happen to be Head! 

Making it look easy is so hard!

Recently, I enjoyed watching an interview of this year’s Alpine ski world cup winners Mikaela Shiffrin and Marco Odermatt. This talk, meant to be a podcast, was conducted by Nick Fellows, the official FIS interviewer. In it, Mikaela said that when people watched her they felt that her skiing looked seemingly easy and effortless, but it was in fact real hard work and no one wanted to realize it. I have to agree. 

What she meant is one of those deceptively simple truths that only makes sense if we’ve lived inside a craft long enough to feel the gap between how mastery looks and what it costs. Since I’m so immersed into skiing, her comment resonates at a deeper level than she even intended. Here’s what I would add, not to correct her, but to expand the idea into something more complete and more honest about high‑level performance. 

When skiing looks “easy,” it’s because the skier has spent thousands of hours removing friction, noise, hesitation, and micro‑errors. In turn, when we watch the skier, we only see fluidity, balance, inevitability and grace. But what we can’t see are the thousands of invisible corrections per minute, a nervous system trained to anticipate chaos, a body that has experienced every type of failure and a mind that has learned to stay quiet under pressure. 

In fact, effortlessness is not the absence of effort but it is its full integration. In fact, for whatever we’re good at doing, the better we get, the more invisible the inner details of our work becomes. This is the paradox of mastery where beginners show their effort, experts hide it and masters erase it. In my example, Shiffrin and Odermatt ski in a way that makes our brain relax when we watch them, but inside their bodies, the workload is enormous, with edge control at an infinitely small level, pressure management that changes every fraction of a second and a constant recalibration of line, timing, and snow feedback. 

We see what happens on the surface, but Marco and Mikaela live the turbulence beneath it. That is when all assume: “She’s gifted. He’s gifted. It must be easy for them.” Yet, talent is real, but it’s only the ignition, what we don’t see is the relentless, boring, repetitive, lonely work that turns talent into inevitability. Mastery requires a relationship with discomfort that very few people ever develop. This is the part Mikaela didn’t say out loud, but it’s the truth, as most of us don’t want to realize how hard it is because they don’t want to imagine choosing that level of discomfort. 

Finally, mastery is lonely and this is the part people rarely talk about. The higher one’s climb, the fewer people can truly understand what they’re doing, so when Mikaela says people don’t want to realize how hard it is, she’s also saying: “Most people can’t imagine the world I live in.” And she’s right. 

The imperfect Donald Trump

Like most of us, Trump isn’t perfect. To start a on positive note, he must be credited for transforming time that used to go so fast before he became our dictator, literally screech to a halt, becoming almost eternal. 

On the negative side, he’s got many, many more negative character traits that we’ll cover below, I see a very impatient Trump and suspect he’s exhibiting behaviors consistent with adult ADHD, including inattentiveness, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, that translate into a huge dose of impatience. Critics cite frequent interruptions and a short attention span, though no formal, public diagnosis exists, but a keen observation of the man suggests. 

Obviously, impatience in a head of state is not a desirable trait because it often leads to hasty decisions, poor judgment, and damaged diplomatic or political relationships, rather than thoughtful, long-term strategy. While it can occasionally create a useful sense of urgency, it more commonly causes excessive risk-taking, strategic failures, and high stress among staff. 

Of course, I have, over his two terms, that his impatience could be seen as the tip of the iceberg if we turned the Donald ice cube around. At rest his iceberg shows narcissism and extreme egotism . Me, me, me is his mantra. Although it could be assimilated the impatience we mention above, impulsivity and erratic behavior follow as he is unable to maintain focus or follow established protocols, leading to abrupt policy changes via social media. 

In consdering that he's the fleshy son of Geppeto, father of Pinocchio, his lies, dishonesty and lack of truthfulness documented by thousands of fake or misleading statements drive the nail further into his lack of credibility. Then, there is bullying and aggressive demeanor that he must have learned from his biological dad and from the New York mafia. 

To conclude, he also needs to be vindictive and obsessed with revenge through a tireless drive to pursue retribution against those perceived as disloyal or antagonistic. This all adds up to winning the Satanic Evil Prize, short of making the nominees list for the Nobel Peace Prize! 

Ski racing and singing…

There are things I should have known 60 years ago, but it’s never too late to learn them as long as it happens, especiallybefore one’s death. A few days ago, a very old French song jingled in my memory and I wondered if I could find it, somehow, somewhere. After some pointless search, I asked a few of my good friends back in France and one of them directed me straight to the song in question, right on YouTube. 

In the process and totally unbeknownst to me, I also found out that Guy Périllat, a famous member of the French Ski Team during the sixties, who had won the bronze at the 1960 Olympics, won most of the classic downhill races in 1961, was GS world champion in 1966 and was silver medal behind Killy at the 1968 Olympics, had recording some songs on the tracks of his racing success and national notoriety. 

Just after his medal at the 1960 Squaw Valley Games and his following record 1960-1961 season, Périllat fell for a singing career. It was a breve incursion into the pop music scene that was marked by recording an EP in 1961 with Polydor, including the song: "L'amour me brûle" (love’s burning me) with lyrics written by Ralph Bernet (one of Johnny Hallyday’s lyricists), and music by Danyel Gérard another French pop artist. 

That song was highly typical of the early 1960s ("crooner" style). At the time, there was such a "Périllat-mania" in France that record labels sought to capitalize on his image as "ideal son-in-law" and national hero. While his career on the slopes was legendary, his singing career remained a mere curiosity that faded very fast. 

This record can still be found today among vinyl collectors, It’s often sought after more for the champion's cover photo than its musical quality. Had he practiced skiing a little more instead of getting distracted by his jaunt into the show business, he might have beaten Killy! 

Envious or Jealous? (Part Three)

Often Jealousy is confused with Envy. I like to call them “cousins”, as they’re closely related emotions because they both stem from discomfort and insecurity. Yet, they’re distinct, Envy involves desiring what someone else has, while Jealousy involves the fear of losing what we already have to someone else. In fact Envy is the pain we feel when someone else has something we want. 

For instance, I’ve been envious all winter long of the great snow my friends enjoyed in the Alps while we a terrible lack of snow in the North American Rockies. Envy is about desire and comparison, not loss. It can be about talent, beauty, freedom, relationships, lifestyle, opportunities and of course, fantastic skiing! Envy is fundamentally one‑to‑one: we want something someone else possesses. 

On the other hand, as we’ve already discussed, Jealousy is the fear of losing something we already have to someone. Jealousy is about threat, not desire. Envy is “I want what you have” and Jealousy is “I fear losing what I have.” This distinction is ancient, shows up across cultures and languages and suggests the hidden engine moving consumerism..

As a feeling, Envy pulls our attention toward the other person, creates longing, comparison, self‑evaluation and can motivate growth or trigger shame. Jealousy pulls our attention toward some kind of threat, creating vigilance, protectiveness, insecurity, it also can strengthen bonds or create conflict. Both feelings activate different psychological systems. 

Envy means aspiration and comparison, while jealousy is linked to attachments and the resulting threat to them. If you feel envy, the question this brings up is: “What desire in me is being awakened?” Like with Jealousy, Envy becomes a map, not a moral judgment. While both feelings can be constructive if managed well, envy and jealousy are not identical, making envy more likely to be considered a flaw than jealousy. 

Both function as important signals for unfulfilled desires rather than inherent moral failings, but envy is more frequently linked to undesirable, negative and destructive behaviors. I hope my explanation didn’t make you envious and stopped jealousy on its tracks! 

Hello, I’m jealous! (Part Two)

After we’ve seen what jealousy is, we could ask ourselves where does it come from? The first question that crossed my mind was if the feeling of jealousy innate? The answer seems to be YES and deeply so. Across cultures, ages, and even species, jealousy appears in predictable patterns. 

One is evolutionary, as it serves us to protect the traditional family cell and ensure parental investment, as well as maintaining our social rank and preventing any loss of resources. It’s not a moral failing; it’s an ancient alarm system that might misfire in modern life and culture.

Jealousy is also not created equal as some of us individuals feel more jealous than others. This is where it gets interesting. I discovered that jealousy isn’t just about the situation, it’s about how our thinking works and how we feel emotions. Some personal dispositions can amplify jealousy, the ways we get attached. 

For instance if it’s anxiety, we feel the strongest jealousy. If we avoid attachment, it’s suppressed but still present. On the other hand if our attachment is secure, we feel the jealousy but it doesn’t dominate us. The stability of our self-esteem also affects our feelings. When I was younger, my self-esteem was weak and this led me to countless flares of jealousy. 

However when success came and gave me more confidence, I was far less prone to that sentiment. It’s clear that if our identity is tightly tied to a relationship, a social or professional role, a skill or any specific position, so any threat to these domains may trigger jealousy. Some of us are wired to track hierarchy and belonging more acutely than others, and can feel shifts in attention or status like a draft in a room. 

Finally, our brain is learning on the go and picking up patterns, so our past experiences of loss or betrayal teaches our brain that jealousy can be used as a guardrail to make sure that none of these past situations happen again. I would add that if we’ve experienced poverty at some moment in our lives, like it’s been my case, we’ve developed a sense of scarcity. 

So, if we think that love is scarce, opportunities are scarce and attention is scarce, jealousy becomes a default reaction. To conclude, I propose a better way to think about jealousy. Let’s not treat it as a problem, but as data. Jealousy always answers one of these questions: 

• What am I afraid of losing? 
• What part of my identity feels threatened? 
• What scarcity am I perceiving? 
• What story am I telling myself about my worth? 
• What past wound is being reactivated? 

If we can train ourselves to decode these different signals, the jealousy we feel becomes a map rather than a trap. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about Envy, that special cousin of Jealousy...

Hello, I’m jealous! (Part One)

Often, I wonder what triggers the feeling of jealousy? Is it innate and what dispositions makes it stronger with certain individuals? From what I have felt and observed, I’d say that jealousy isn’t random, and it isn’t a flaw either. It’s one of the oldest emotional systems we’ve evolved, signaling us to protect things that we feel essential, like relationships, status, belonging, identity, and security. 

I have experienced enough jealousy through my life to have grown familiar with that pesky monster every time I wasn’t feeling self-secured enough. In researching that feeling, we can understand what jealousy is trying to protect and it becomes far less mysterious. I’ve taken the time to look at that sneaky feeling and what I’ve found is that they’re human situations that will be guaranteed to trigger jealousy.

Almost all cases fall into one of these categories. First, a valued relationship is threatened, whether it is of romantic, familial, or friendly nature. For instance, if someone else gets attention when we feel it should be going to us, or if our partner seems drawn to another person or a friend invests more into someone else. These are classic cases, the jealousy we feel is like a guard dog that watches for what’s attached to us. 

Next there’s a form of jealousy we rarely admit, a threat to our status or our identity. In that situation, a colleague gets praised for something we normally excel at, or someone enters our social circle with a skill we’re known for. Another instance is a co-worker that succeeds in a domain tied to our self-worth. In all these situations our jealousy acts as a protector of what makes our specific identity or strength. 

Another category is a threat to our resources, whether they are emotional, social, or material. For example, someone else gets the job we were hoping for, a sibling receives a larger share of an inheritance or a coworker gets more access to the big boss. All these cases respond to perceived scarcity. Finally, there’s the threat of belonging. 

We’re tribal animals and we don’t want to be excluded. So we get jealous when we’re being left out of plans or of team, when we’re not invited to a party, when we see others bond without us or feel we’re replaced in a working group. This tells us that we’re socially displaced. This pretty much sets the stage for the causes of jealousy and in the next blog, we’ll see how jealousy gets inside us.