Ski Length CalculatorAbout Ski Length Calculator
Ski Length Calculator exists because ski sizing advice is scattered across retail charts, federation rulebooks and forum folklore, and the charts rarely agree about why they say what they say. This site puts the published sources in one place, states the numbers each calculator uses, and shows its working on every page — so the answer you get can be checked against the sources yourself.
Who maintains this site
The site is maintained by Ian Welkins, who built the calculators and writes the guidance. There is no team of sponsored athletes and no retail affiliation behind it — and no claim of either anywhere on the site. The authority the calculators have comes from their sources, not from the biography of the person presenting them, which is why every calculator page ends in a Sources block rather than a testimonial.
The model is the same as the rest of the craft: start from the tool people actually need — here, the ski length calculator on the homepage — and keep every satellite page honest about how it differs from it.
Where the numbers come from
Every constant in the calculators is sourced, and the sourcing rule is strict: no number ships from a single unverified claim. The adult alpine chart is evo's published sizing table, read directly and checked against the other major retailers' charts; the cross-country bands are Rossignol's published weight chart as distributed by Gear West; the pole multipliers (0.83 classic, 0.89 skate, the 0.69-calibrated downhill table) are the formulas retailers publish, cross-checked between at least two of them; and the race minimums come from the FIS equipment specifications, verified against a peer-reviewed tabulation of the same rules and an independent race guide.
Where sources disagree, the site says so on the page and picks the consensus — the pole page, for instance, notes the one height where a retailer's printed table and its own formula differ by a step. Judgment calls (the beginner column's primacy, the older-skier comfort trim, the touring deduction) are labelled as models, with the reasoning shown, not smuggled in as facts.
That provenance is printed on the page, not kept in a drawer: every calculator page ends with a Sources block naming the publications behind its numbers, and carries a dated last verified line showing when those figures were last checked against them. If a publisher revises its chart, that date is what makes a page's staleness visible — a number whose source has moved on is a number waiting to be corrected.
How the calculators are tested
Before any change is published, the build runs an automated check suite over the whole site: every calculator's headline cases are recomputed independently and compared (an adult mid case, a kids' case, both XC disciplines, all three pole modes, and the FIS minimums enforced as hard floors), every worked example on every page is regenerated from the calculator engine and diffed against the page — a hand-typed example number fails the build — and links, schema, metadata and mobile layout are checked page by page. A correction from a reader goes through the same suite before it goes live.
Found a number that disagrees with a current source? That is exactly what the error report page is for — cite the source, and if you're right, the fix ships with the check added so it can't regress.
Both unit systems are exercised end to end, not just the metric one: the suite runs the calculators in centimetres and kilograms and again in feet, inches and pounds, because skiers use both. That is not ceremony — it is how a real fault was caught before this site launched, when imperial entries turned out to be rejected by form limits written for metric ranges. The fix shipped with the test that found it, so the fault cannot return quietly.
What this site is not
Ski Length Calculator is a reference tool, and its limits are deliberate policy. It is not a shop: nothing is sold here, no stock is listed and no checkout exists. It carries no product rankings: there are no best-skis lists, no affiliate rankings and no sponsored placements, and no manufacturer can pay to be recommended or to have a rival's chart quietly dropped. Brands are named only where a brand's published sizing chart is the source of a number — credited as sources, in the open, the same way the FIS is credited for its equipment rules — never as endorsements. A page that cannot justify itself with sources and shown working does not belong on this site.