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.
Why I built it
Ask three ski shops how long your skis should be and you can get three different answers — and each answer tends to end at a ski that shop happens to stock. Most sizing advice in skiing is written by the people selling the skis, and the charts disagree with each other more than skiers realise: one brand's table puts a skier of a given height in the low 170s, another's in the low 160s, with nothing said about the gap.
I built this site to be the neutral corner. It holds no inventory and recommends no products. The calculators work from the published sizing grids and the FIS equipment minima — the same documents the shops and the federation work from — and every answer shows the chart it came from, so you can hold the number up against the source and judge it yourself. Where two published charts disagree, the page says which one it followed and why.
About the author
I'm Ian Welkins, an independent web developer based in Houston, Texas — flatter country than this site's subject, which is exactly why its numbers come from published charts rather than from anybody's days on snow, mine included. I build small, single-purpose calculator websites: one tool, one job, its working shown. No sign-up, no accounts, nothing to install.
This site is researched, built and maintained by me personally. I read the sizing grids and the FIS equipment rules, encode them into the calculators, test the outputs, and answer the error reports. The charts the calculators run on are reproduced from the published sources named on the pages themselves — where a Sources block names evo, Rossignol or the FIS, those are the documents the figures were taken from, checked on the date the page shows.
You can find me, and check that for yourself, on these profiles:
- GitHub — my projects and code
- Dev.to — notes on building these tools
- About.me — all my sites and profiles in one place
- Gravatar — my verified profile
Found a figure that disagrees with a current chart? Tell me through the report-error page — I read every report myself. For anything else, the contact page is the way to reach me.
A note on AI
I use AI tools as drafting and coding assistants, the way many independent developers do now. The sizing figures never come from a model: every chart on this site is transcribed from the published source named in its Sources block — the retailers' sizing grids, the FIS equipment specifications — and verified against those documents before a page goes live, and the calculators' outputs are checked by an automated suite that recomputes the headline cases independently. If a number is wrong, the report-an-error form reaches a person — me — and I fix it against the source.
Where the numbers come from
The calculators' constants come from published sources, and the sourcing rule is strict: no number rests on a single unverified claim where a checkable second source exists (one exception, the beginner column, is disclosed in the Editorial Policy). 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 labeled 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 — roughly 2,900 checks in total. The calculators' 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, so 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 centimeters 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.