THE BOOT WHISPERER SVEN

His achievements include a two-piece, four-buckle overlap design that won hundreds of World Cup events as well as the three-piece cabriolet, popular from World Cup downhill tracks to terrain parks. He added touches like the power strap and the removable liner, pioneered on-site custom insoles and silicone injected liners, and brought on-site custom fitting and after-market expertise to the masses.

Coomer was born in Sydney, Australia to a Swedish mother and an Australian father. At 16, he competed in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics in the pentathlon, and didn’t ski until 1960 in Åre, Sweden, where he studied design and mechanical engineering in university. He was “immediately smitten” with the sport.

COURTESY OF THE U.S. SKI & SNOWBOARD HALL OF FAME

As a prolific boot whisperer for half a century, Sven Coomer made plastic perform without pain, birthed custom insoles, silicone liners and other designs that still resonate today.

Ski boots remain perhaps the most critical piece of gear—even if the recent explosion of ski shapes has hogged all the headlines. And Coomer is the most influential boot designer of the modern era.

Coomer arrived in the U.S. in the mid-1960s and was soon recruited by Skiing magazine to participate in its inaugural ski and boot tests.

“Over six weeks, I found that testing equipment, analyzing and problem-solving, were my true calling,” recalls Coomer, who was soon spending summers at the magazine’s New York City offices to write up the test results and various technical articles.

In 1968, Coomer’s transformative ideas led him to get hired at Nordica. Coomer soon moved to Italy, where the Nordica factory was making the transition from leather to plastic boots. Leather was comfortable, but would break down after two