Featured Image: by Almo Film
Lengths: 176, 184, 191 cm
DIM: 140-110-133 mm
Radius: 20m @ 184 cm
As a big mountain skier that’s clicked into a pair of Rossignol boards in recent years, you likely land in one of two camps: BlackOps or Sender. The BlackOps line has the characteristics of playful twin tip powder skis while the Sender line is a more powerful, flat tail directional ski.
Rossignol athletes like Logan Pehota and Max Palm craved a hybrid of those two lines in a ski with that perfect waist width of 110-mm to surf deep snow but still rip arcs when needed. Thus, the Sender Free 110 was born.
“This new Sender Free 110 has the shape of a Black Ops ski but the guts of a Sender,” Rossignol Alpine Category Manager Jake Stevens says. “What we’ve created is a twin tip rockered powder ski that is 110 underfoot but has the reactiveness and playfulness of the Sender.”
To achieve that playfulness, Rossignol went with a thinner PEFC Poplar wood core and a Nano topsheet. That combination drastically shaved weight to give the Sender Free 110 the ability to slash and swiftly change directions.
The ski features Rossignol’s Titanal Ti Beam underfoot much like the Sender 94 Ti and 106 Ti+, to provide excellent grip, power and balance. Their proprietary Diago Fiber, a magic blend of fiber and carbon weaved together, also finds its way into the Sender Free 110 to deliver extra pop and power. Finally, they added Rossignol’s signature Air Tip to aid in that playfulness and maximize flotation.
“The Air Tip in this ski is about half the size of what the original Air Tip was when it came out,” Stevens says. “Shortening the Air Tip keeps the ski damp but also cuts down on swing weight—making it really easy to move the ski around.”
The graphics, featuring an icy blue in the tip and a hot red moving into the black tail, are a departure from the rest of the more muted top sheets of the Sender line. The color transitions are achieved using subtle tree designs and the base mimics the colors and graphics on the top of the ski.
The ski is available this month in the same 184 and 191 cm lengths that Max Palm and Oscar Mandin ski on in the Freeride World Tour and that Marcus Goguen just won the Freeride Junior World Championships skiing. A 176 cm Sender Free 110 will hit the market in the fall and more lengths could follow in future seasons.
“At 110-mm underfoot, I see this at that sweet spot for a powder ski,” Stevens says. “It’s not some boring beast that only floats through powder at 100 mph—this is something you can go into the trees with and pivot super easily. We’ve had a crazy winter so far in Utah, like 75 percent over our average snowpack, and I wouldn’t want to be skiing on anything else but the Sender Free 110 every single day.”
