Spademan binding

Spademan was a type of ski binding, one of a number of "plate bindings" that were popular in alpine skiing during the 1970s. It used a bronze plate screwed into the bottom of the boot as its connection point, held to the ski by a clamp-like mechanism that grasped the side of the plate. Unlike conventional bindings, the Spademan could release in any direction, in response to any force or torque. It provided greatly improved protection compared to contemporary designs, which generally allowed release of the toe to the sides and heel directly forward, keeping the foot attached in any other fall direction.

The Spademan system became very popular in the late 1970s. Production mis-steps right when new toe-and-heel bindings were being introduced led to a , and the Spademan system disappeared in the early 1980s. However, the fact that it used a single mounting plate eliminated adjustments for different sized boots, which made it popular in rental shops for some time. The Look Integral was introduced to fill this niche when Spademan exited the market.

In 1962, Dr. Richard Spademan took a job at the Tahoe Forest Hospital in Truckee, California. This was just after the 1960 Winter Olympics at the Squaw Valley Ski Resort, and traffic on the hill had increased as a result. In the early 1960s there were a number of quick-release binding systems on the market, but most of them required the user to bolt fittings to the toe and heel. Improperly assembled, or adjusted, these systems failed to release consistently. Spademan would later remark "Bindings were trash. We saw 150 fractures in a three-day weekend."

Studying the problem, Spademan found three problems; bindings didn't release in the directions that caused problems, they didn't release under straight-line deceleration, and the adjustments were too complex. In particular, he noted that any forward fall, even to the sides, would jam the boot into the toe clips. This meant that a forward twisting fall would work against the fundamental action of the binding. Spademan desired a binding that had no toe piece, allowing the boot to slide forward unimpeded. His first attempt to solve these problems clipped to the sides of a plate at the heel, with no toe clip at all. However, this allowed the toe to move about too much, so a new toe clip was added to address this. He then noticed that the key to reducing injury would be to mount the ski over the tribal axis of the leg, below the calf. This would reduce torque on the knee and ankle when the ski rotated under the boot. This led to a new design with the binding mounted under the boot, and from there to the final Spademan design.

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