Top Five Fridays: September 19, 2025
This week, skiing lost one of our most famous ambassadors: Robert Redford. Far more than just a Hollywood actor who owned a ski resort, Redford’s passion for the sport was unmatched. Learn more about his story in highlight #4. Images used in this mashup can be found here, and here.
#1: The FIS & Ski Austria Have Agreed to Centralized Media Rights, Paving the Way for Uninhibited International Broadcasts:
While we have to wait a little longer, the end is in sight: starting next year, most international FIS events will be watchable globally, while Austria joins the group in 2027/2028. Image: Soelden on Facebook
Hello, and welcome to Top Five Fridays, the September 19, 2025 edition! This week feels a bit more lowkey than usual, as we’re experiencing what we expect to be the calm before the storm. With FIS World Cup action starting in just over a month and multiple North American mountains receiving snow, we’re truly on the verge of winter. But, we’re not there yet. Between then and now, we have a few more weeks to get our gear together as we patiently wait for opening day, sharing whatever ski news comes our way in the meantime. While this week’s news is a bit less involved than most of our coverage here, there’s still plenty to get to - especially when it comes to our first highlight, so let’s get started.
This week it was announced that the FIS and Ski Austria have finally reached a deal that will allow the FIS to centralize the country’s media rights. With Austria finally joining the fold, all of the FIS’s member nations have now signed agreements with the organization to allow them to handle the international distribution of their broadcasts.
If none of these words are really registering with you, don’t worry, we get it. The whole thing is pretty complex, but just know this: starting in 2026/2027, you will finally be able to watch FIS events occurring in any country in the world besides Austria. In the 2027/2028 season, Austria joins the fold and the FIS will have the ability to broadcast any event in any country, regardless of where it takes place.
For fans of the sport, the league itself, and athletes - this is huge. On the league level, this centralization effort has been a hallmark issue for president Johan Eliasch whose campaign for FIS presidency was largely built on centralizing media rights. Now, four years and seemingly endless negotiations later, he’s made good on his promise. As a result, FIS sports will finally be viewable on a global level in the same way that leagues like Formula 1 and FIFA are. For athletes, this means further international visibility, potentially creating an opportunity where people all over the world don’t just know the names “Mikaela Shiffrin” and “Marcel Hirscher”, but also “Paula Moltzan” and “Marco Odermatt” - and that’s just in the Alpine Skiing world. Under the FIS umbrella are several other disciplines, ranging from freestyle and freeride, to XC, longjumping, and aerials. Along with increased visibility for athletes in all of these sports also comes increased financial opportunities, from sponsorships, to prize money, and even endorsement deals. While the ability to broadcast events anywhere in the world doesn’t guarantee that FIS sports become the next big international league, at the very least it allows it to be a possibility.
And of course, it’s huge for us as fans as well. Here on Chairlift Chat, we do our best to bring you coverage of World Cup events - racing in particular, but also freestyle and freeskiing. Unfortunately though, we don’t always get to watch the events ourselves and instead rely heavily on results, reporting, and whatever highlights we can find online. As a group that would love to consume as much of this content as possible, it’s been frustrating to simply not be able to. That is, until next season, when we can watch nearly all of it, or the 2027/2028 season when Austria joins the fold and no event will be off limits.
While this week’s update may not seem like a game changer at first, the reality is, it very well could be. To learn more about the agreement with Ski Austria as well as the future of FIS international broadcasts, check out this report from SportsPro.com.
#2: Head / Tyrolia Becomes the Official Gear Supplier for the Freeride World Tour:
Image: Freeride World Tour
Sticking with the theme of increased exposure for FIS athletes, our next highlight is brief but big news for those in the Freeride World Tour orbit. This week, it was announced that Head / Tyrolia have signed on to become the official gear supplier for the Freeride World Tour. Noting that tour athletes all have their own sponsorship agreements, this particular partnership is aimed at supporting the entire FWT staff - from judges and camerapeople, to those setting the course and preparing venues. Whereas these people would’ve previously needed to supply their own equipment, they’ll now be outfitted with HEAD skis, boots, and poles, as well as Tyrolia bindings. To be fair, this portion is a pretty small piece of news.
The bigger story here though, is that it’s proof of the aforementioned concept that with more coverage of events comes more partnership opportunities, and therefore financial opportunities for athletes. As you’ll recall, the FIS purchased the Freeride World Tour back in December of 2022. While that acquisition has resulted in little change on the front-end of the sport thus far, the wheels have certainly been turning behind the scenes as the FIS has made subtle tweaks to its qualification systems. Now entering its third year of FIS ownership, we’re starting to see changes on the front end of the sport as well. For example, this season will mark the debut of the FIS Freeride World Championships, set to take place in Andorra in the first week of February. This event, which serves as a standalone event, checks a lot of boxes for the sport as the FIS works to have it included in the 2030 Winter Olympics. By hosting this event, the FIS will have successfully created and deployed the kind of global qualification system required for a sport to be considered by the Olympics. It has also made progress in developing the type of sport that attracts title sponsors.
Ultimately, this story, as simple as it may seem, is much bigger than the fact that Freeride World Tour employees are getting free skis this year. Instead, it’s a sign of things to come, and an excellent example of how more exposure for a sport can lead to more sponsorship opportunities, and ultimately, financial opportunities for the athletes. To learn more about this, check out the announcement from the Freeride World Tour.
#3: Three Years Removed from Disaster, New Hampshire’s Gunstock Mountain Resort is Flourishing, to the Tune of $10 Million in Self-Financed Improvements:
Last season, Gunstock’s Mountain Ops had to perform an emergency repair on their Panorama lift to keep it operating through the remainder of the season. Now, they’re hard at work upgrading the systems to ensure it runs all winter long. Image: Gunstock Mountain Resort on Facebook
Next up this week, is an update from Gunstock Mountain Resort in New Hampshire, where mountain ops is hard at work, implementing roughly $10 million in upgrades ahead of the season. Now, to be quite honest, we don’t typically share stories like this as they’re pretty regional and at the end of the day, there’s an endless amount of ski resort development updates we could share. If we leaned into that, Top Five Fridays would get pretty boring. But, this particular story stands out to us for two reasons: it provides a solid progress report from a mountain that we shared a potentially disastrous story about just three years ago, and this particular article from the Laconia Daily Sun provides a level of detail we don’t normally see when it comes to development news. So with that in mind, let’s talk Gunstock.
Longtime readers and Gunstock locals alike might recall our coverage from the summer of 2022, when the mountain’s leadership team suddenly found itself in turmoil. It’s a pretty long and unique story, but our best effort at quickly summarizing it is this: back in 2020, a man named Tom Day was hired as the General Manager of county-owned Gunstock Mountain Resort. In the first two years of his tenure, Day was something of a miracle worker, raising the mountain’s annual revenue from $12 million to $18 million annually. Bucking industry trends, the small ski area was doing so well that it was able to spend its own money on infrastructure improvements without the need for loans. Then, in 2022, the county appointed two new members to the Gunstock Area Commission - a five member board that’s tasked with overseeing the resort’s operations. Historically, this commission has played a soft role in things, but these two new members had different plans. Instead, they decided to micromanage what was an already extremely successful business. As a result, Tom Day resigned in frustration, with an additional 5 senior staff members following suit. Chaos erupted. In the aftermath, the two new commissioners were pulled from the board, and the legislators responsible for giving them the jobs were ultimately voted out of office.
There was a bit of a silver lining though: public backlash was so strong and so swift that Tom Day and his staff rejoined the mountain just 13 days later. For the next two years, Day would continue to oversee operations at the resort, where annual revenue eventually grew to $20 million.
This week, we had the pleasure of learning more about the fruits of Tom Day’s labor. Currently at Gunstock, mountain ops is working on implementing approximately $10 million in upgrades ahead of the season, and thanks to some excellent reporting from the Laconia Daily Sun, we know exactly where that money’s going. In total, the resort is spending $3 million on lift upgrades and maintenance, $2.5 million on snowmaking and grooming, and over $4 million on other electrical and infrastructure upgrades.
What interests us most about this update though is that the level of insight doesn’t stop here. Instead, we learn more about the equipment being installed, and the reasons why. Take for instance the $3 million in lift upgrades. Part of that money is going to installing a new chair spacing system on the resort’s Panorama detachable quad lift, which experienced issues and had to be closed for a 6 day stretch last season. At that time, the system that’s in place to regulate the distance between chairs as they enter and exit the station went down. While the resort was able to get it up and running for the remainder of the year, replacing this system is an important upgrade to prevent the same situation from recurring next year. This particular upgrade is part of a larger refurbishment process in which the resort has already upgraded the lift’s communications systems and has plans to build new buildings to house the lift structures at the base and summit.
Beyond the Panorama lift upgrades, we also learn about several other lifts receiving upgrades, ranging from new haul ropes, to new gear boxes, and lift drives. In addition to lifts, the article also treats us to plenty of details regarding the exact quantity and type of new snowmaking machines, where they’ll be placed, and exactly what makes them more efficient. We learn about the mountain’s new Klik hydrant system, which allows them to quickly adjust water and air pressure for their snowmaking system using a simple 5-lever preset system. We learn about two new grooming machines, and what that means for the mountain’s steepest terrain and terrain parks. The list goes on.
Overall, it’s a very impressive story about a mountain that, despite the odds, is flourishing as a key member of its community. If you joined us last week and found yourself interested in our coverage of Colorado Mountain College’s Mountain Operations program, then this week’s report from Laconia Daily Sun serves as excellent follow up reading.
#4: The Best Skier in Hollywood, Robert Redford, Has Passed Away at 89:
Listening to Robert Redford talk about Sundance, you can tell, he was one of us.
Finally, for our last highlight this week, we pay tribute to a man who was influential not only in Hollywood, but also in our world of skiing. That man, of course, is Robert Redford, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 89.
Known as a Hollywood movie star to those in the common world, Robert Redford held a special place in the hearts of those in the ski world. Despite being a man whose fame would’ve enabled him to do quite literally anything in the world during the 1960’s and ‘70s, Robert Redford decided to buy a ski resort. In 1968, Redford bought a 5,000 acre ski area in North Provo, Utah called Timp Haven. Having funded the purchase using proceeds from his leading role in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” he aptly renamed the ski area “Sundance” and began creating the unique ski area that it is today.
Perhaps most admirably though was Redford’s connection to skiing. Rather than being a Hollywood actor who saw profits in the mountains, Redford’s decision to purchase Sundance was driven by an almost primal love for the sport. In this tribute from Powder (a magazine which he once graced the cover of), Redford is quoted as saying, “For me, personally, skiing holds everything. I used to race cars, but skiing is a step beyond that. It removes the machinery and puts you one step closer to the elements. And it’s a complete physical expression of freedom.” Really, that’s why we love the guy. Clearly he gets it. Clearly he’s one of us. Despite the immense fame and wealth he experienced during the height of his career, at the end of the day, Robert Redford had the heart not unlike that of a ski bum. The man just wanted to ski.
Of course Redford’s movie career and affinity for skiing didn’t exist independently. Instead, he found a way to expertly blend them together through the creation of the Sundance Film Festival. Originally a three day conference in which independent filmmakers could connect and network, Sundance Film Festival quickly evolved to become an important annual event, hosted in Park City, Utah. While the festival is set to leave town after this year, its presence for 40 years brought many celebrities to town, exposing them to what ski culture is all about.
Finally, before we round this highlight out, we want to point you towards an interview with SKI Magazine that the publication recently unearthed and graciously shared. In addition to giving us incredible insights into the type of man Robert Redford was, it also provides a fascinating look into industry occurrences back in 1975. If you’ve ever heard the term, “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” well, this interview is exactly that. From lamenting the capitalization of the ski industry, to being unable to escape the ski influencers of the time, Robert Redford shares the same thoughts that many of us are having today - albeit 50 years ago. If you’ve got a minute, we highly recommend giving the interview a read.