Industry News
Many people enjoy hobbies when they have the time, and many people like collecting things as well. Then there is that one group of people whose hobby is skiing, and they like collecting skis. We all know this group very well. It’s a group that is defined as being passionate, dedicated, and even obsessed. No matter how many days they ski a season, it is never enough, and no matter how many pairs of skis they own, it is never enough. Even the most die-hard skiers rarely own more than five pairs of skis.
However, that does not apply to Peter Hayes, who has collected and owns over 300 pairs of skis and does not plan to stop anytime soon. Hayes started in the ski industry, working at Hickory and Tweed in Armonk, New York. Working in the retail ski industry gave Hayes the experience, opportunity, and passion for collecting skis from the time he was a teenager. Hayes, who lives outside of Hartford, Connecticut, has worked in the ski industry for over 40 years and has gained a wealth of knowledge. He can tell you almost every type of ski made, its specifications, and why it was good or bad.
Working at that ski shop in the 1970s gave Hayes some interesting and fascinating experiences. Due to its location near affluent neighborhoods, the Hickory and Tweed Ski Shop didn’t even have prices on anything it sold at the time. There were no price tags on skis, equipment, clothing, or anything. “It was like a Beverly Hills Ski Shop. People would just come in and grab what they wanted and hand over their credit cards,” Hayes said with a laugh. Greenwich, Connecticut, which is not that far away from the shop, had clients like Robert and John Jr. Kennedy and Carl Icahn, who would come into the shop for skis and equipment. Hayes would take care of the ski equipment for the Kennedys while he worked at the ski shop. He was friends with John Jr. Kennedy until he was killed in his tragic plane crash and still maintains contact with Robert, RFK Jr.
Hayes’s collection consists of some pairs of skis that have never been drilled or skied and some that are no longer being manufactured. His amazing journey of collecting all these skis sometimes led him to the dumpsters. He would pick out “good” skis out of dumpsters that he thought could be salvaged. As his collection grew in size and popularity, his friends would even drop pairs of skis at his house to add to it.
Hayes has had the opportunity to meet legendary ski manufacturers throughout his life. One of those early ski manufacturers was Howard Head, who founded the Head Ski Company in 1950. Hayes owns the first 10 pairs that Head ever made and has a total of 35 pairs of Head Skis in his collection.
Hayes also worked as a Völkl Ski Technician Rep for World Cup freestyle and alpine racers and did all their equipment setups. Hayes has a pair of Völkl test skis from the 1970s, which were made of carbon fiber with a foam core. Völkl never made a foam-core ski, according to Hayes. The skis were made of a torsion box construction design that is hard to think of today. “It was a test ski with a foam core, wrapped in a sock of fiberglass with steel edges on it. It was a steel brick, but it was good on the ice,” Hayes chuckled.
Hayes also met Mike Brunetto, who was making Research Dynamics skis out of his garage at the time. They were homemade powder skis with the width of a cross-country ski and the flex of a noodle. The production on them was absolute garbage, but they skied well in powder back in the day,” Hayes said. He owns eight or nine pairs of those. Brunetto started Research Dynamics (RD), the company he began in his garage in 1975. Before that, he had made skis for Head, Dura-Fiber, The Ski, Lynx, and K2. By 1982, RD had outgrown Brunetto’s garage.
Mike Brunetto made a pair of skis that would later become the K2 Vos Slamon skis the Mahre brothers skied on. Phil and Steve Mahre won Gold and Silver in the Men’s Alpine Skiing Slalom competitions during the Sarajevo 1984 Olympic Winter Games. In 1979, they tried the foam-core version of a test ski and found it too slow, so K2 made the shovel firmer to bring the ski around faster. Hayes has the only known pair of those, which were Brunetto’s original test models for the K2 VOs. Brunetto later told Hayes that he only made a few pairs of those skis.
Hayes still hits the mountains each season on his 195-centimeter Salomon X Screams from the 1990s. According to Hayes, they have soft tips and tails and a solid cap construction. It was the first high-performance ski made at the time and one of the industry’s first shaped skis. The dimensions were: Tip: 106, Waist: 68, Tail: 96, and Hayes claims he skied four feet of powder at Mount Snow two years ago, and they performed well. However, he admits he prefers skiing fast and sometimes straightlining it down the mountain.
Hayes’s favorite pair of skis from his collection is the 1978 Atomic Downhill Ski that he bought from an Atomic rep as a teenager in the 1980s. These skis were used by Austrian skier legend Hugo Nindl. In the 1960s, he was the overall Slalom World Cup winner, two-time Professional World Champion, six-time Austrian Junior Champion, and nine-time Austrian Champion. Hayes’s pair of skis are undrilled and 220 centimeters long, and he believes they are the only ones in existence.
Hayes has his collection of skis on display throughout his whole house, with one exception: No skis are allowed in the bedroom. Apparently, that is where his wife draws the line. He has so many pairs of skis that he could build his own volant stainless steel ski chair. “I can’t bring myself to cut the skis in half to make it (the volant chair); it would be like cutting my children apart,” Hayes said.
Every pair of skis in Hayes’s collection tells a unique story. Moving forward, he plans to make a video with the help of a friend that will introduce his ski collection to people who are interested in the background, stories, and history of these skis. “I want to categorize what I know (about his ski collection), put it into an online video series, and then create a chatroom where people can chime in on each ski that is presented,” Hayes said. There’s a niche in the ski industry that would gravitate towards the history and knowledge of the collection of skis Hayes has. “A lot of people in the industry are aging out, and I want to catch a lot of these people before it’s too late,” Hayes said.
Hayes hopes his videos and chatroom will be a success. He believes it has a solid foundation of knowledge and experience. There wasn’t a single question asked throughout the interview that Hayes did not know the answer to. The video series would give viewers the opportunity to look at not only the history of ski manufacturing but also the industry’s history. The sooner Hayes launches his video series, the better because he isn’t going to stop adding to his collection of skis, and he doesn’t throw skis in the garbage; therefore, the series will go on for eternity. “I’ve never thrown out a pair of skis,” Hayes said, laughing.
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