A fellow telemark-obsessed individual I correspond with stumbled upon an interesting reddit post lately. A lifelong alpine skier had inherited their father’s Scarpa T2s and a classic cable/cartridge 75mm ski setup. The boots fit perfectly, but there was a catch. “So the last thing I need are bindings,” the user wrote. “[I’m] hoping to avoid the old school style with the strap that hooks on the heel of the boot. Are there any new tele bindings that you’d recommend to pair with these boots? Or should I just bite the bullet and get new boots?”
Why had this newcomer to telemark so quickly reject the ‘old style’? Especially considering they had access to a free pair of skis with said bindings?
While the Reddit poster later explained that they "want[ed] to do more tele but there has to be a better type of binding setup,” the reader who brought this to my attention wondered if the newer guard in telemark may see cable bindings in a poor light, a la ankle socks and jambands, and that the newschool scene had possibly succeeded in casting them off into the dustbin of irrelevance and tackiness.
Maybe cable bindings had been canceled.
Heel cables indeed seem to be afflicted with a certain stigma anymore. Even from within the sport. Many who telemark have eschewed them for the new telemark norm and its many features and strong skiing ability, in the process occasionally skewering cable holdouts as weirdos and Luddites.
But there might be more to it, their association with a bygone era and its Phishy aura lending a clue. Perhaps even the way the cables dangle when skis are shouldered harkens too much to a graying old guard. As my fellow aging telemark chum noted, people seem to “associate them with dorky dads, with telemark’s dark ages (that is the retrograde 2010’s when telemark was ‘supremely uncool’)” and that what seemed to be ‘in’ was “the newer bindings that don’t have the heel cable.”
He might be on to something. In the first edition of newschool outfit TELE COLO’s magazine, released late in 2023, team athlete Greg Yearsley was asked in an interview if he had to pick a fight with telemark, what would it be over. Seeming to refer to a stogy older guard he responded, “I’d say it would be with the super serious mainstream.” Referencing legacy cable bindings disparagingly, he later stated “it always blows my mind when people get their Targa’s in a twist over what other people are doing in the industry, what other people like (NTN deniers….).” Whether viewed as functionally-inferior or a symbol of stagnation, the cable seems to inhabit a lowly realm in the minds of newer telemark skiers.
So has the cable been canceled? Does it mark the last nail in the coffin of the 75mm norm, finally put to rest by the rising new newschool in telemark?
And what does this mean for modern binding platforms that use a heel cable, like the Telemark Tech System? Is that platform dead on arrival to a younger cohort who can’t help but see their lame parents when they see a cable binding?
Interestingly, the reddit user kept their duckbilled boots. But they went a newschool, cableless route for the binding. “I bought some Bishop BMFs today and am stoked to try them out this winter,” they said.
Thus another cable binding, laid to rest.
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