Mean Jean, Ski Queen

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How Jeannie Thoren got the nickname “Mean Jean, the Ski Queen” is a mystery. To most women who know her, she is actually a Snow Angel.

For 30 years, Mean Jean’s mission has been to get women to have fun on skis. But rather than a pocketful of hand warmers, a tray of cocktails or a stack of discount lift tickets, her lure has been a Phillips screwdriver … and a simple promise to make the ski work better with the woman.

“The weak link in a woman’s skiing is usually her equipment,” insists this feisty brunette. She’s spent a career campaigning to change that.

To Jeannie, “women-specific” equipment doesn’t mean pink and flowered. She fights for better fit and function, repeating the mantra: “Women are not small men.”

Manufacturers – mostly men – have been slow to take her cue. So Jeannie (and maybe this is where the “mean” takes root) started adjusting equipment herself while preaching her mantra with what some have dubbed “the tenacity of a pit bull.”

Jeannie comes by her tenacity naturally, growing up surrounded by hard-working Scandinavians in Marquette, the capital city of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Breaking new ground has never scared her. Jeannie was the first girl in Marquette to have a paper route, the first female allowed to be a lifeguard at the “dangerous” swimming holes and the first woman hired to pump gas. She spent a season unloading king crab boats in the Shumagin Islands of Alaska and became the archipelago’s first official longshorewoman.

In the heart of Lake Superior’s Big Snow Country, Jeannie learned to love winter, but as the middle of nine children, she didn’t learn to ski until she could buy her own lift tickets. At 13, she earned $1.50 per Mass playing organ at St. Peter’s Cathedral. That money went toward another religious experience for Jeannie: skiing.

It was money well spent. By 17, she qualified for the Junior National Ski Team. After college, it was her ticket to the world, and Jeannie washed dishes in Switzerland, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Sun Valley, Idaho, to pursue her passion.

While ski bumming in Wyoming, her skills plateaued. She was told that she bent too much at the waist, skiing knock-kneed and in the “back seat.”

“No matter how hard I tried or trained, I just couldn’t get better.”

That is, until she read Warren Witherell’s How the Racers Ski. His ideas on modifying equipment for individual alignment made sense. Right away, she tested his concepts with shims, or cants – thin layers of plastic – under her bindings to level out her foot pressure on the ski and to align the knock-knees natural to many women into a straighter stance.

“Once I got those cants in place, I skied the mountain nonstop, and at the bottom I was so mad I started pitching. I threw my skis, poles, hat and goggles as far as I could toss them into the woods. Then I sat down and cried for an hour. I couldn’t believe it. After years of hard work, what I really needed were just a couple of strips of plastic.”

That revelation launched Jeannie’s revolution. She knew that she wasn’t the only woman stalled on the mountain. She studied how differences between men’s and women’s bodies translate into ski performance. “Women have bigger hips and smaller shoulders so their center of gravity is lower and farther back than a man’s. No wonder their tips tend to wander or cross, and they fall backwards. It’s like driving a car from the back seat.”

To make matters worse, women have smaller feet, so their weight distribution rarely matches factory binding mounts, usually settings suited to a 200-pound man with size 9 shoes.

To compensate, Jeannie moves women’s bindings forward, generally 2 centimeters.

Once she got the physics and anatomy down, Jeannie hunted more mechanical solutions. Hired as the first woman in Sun Valley’s Race Department, she experimented, using tools as unsophisticated as matchbooks under her bootliner heels. That fix positions women more on the balls of their feet, snugging up their narrower heels and elevating their lower calves.

By the fall 1988 she was ready to hit the road and share her discoveries.

What started as a tour of Midwest resorts with five pairs of skis in a station wagon turned into a coast-to-coast crusade in a 28-foot trailer packed with 100 pairs of skis, 100 pairs of boots, poles, foot beds, heel lifts and a tuning bench.

“As a ski tester for Ski and Skiing magazines, I got to cherry pick the best women’s equipment, and that’s what Tom and I would haul around the country for women to try.”

The apron in Thoren’s family, by the way, is leather and is usually worn by her husband, Tom Haas, at the ski-tuning bench. The two have been married for 14 years. Tom, also a lifelong skier, ranks as Jeannie’s most loyal supporter, co-driving her winter crusade and helping her prove her point to the ski industry.

Many women regard this tall, dark-haired Birkebeiner cross-country champion as “The Saint.” While Jeannie was on the slopes teaching, he rarely left the trailer and often scooted on his knees ripping liners out of boots to insert footbeds and heel lifts.

“Stamina is this man’s middle name,” says Natalie Kurylko, a “Thoren Theory” alumnus.

The stories of Marla Buckmaster of Marquette and Susan Borrelli of Atlanta, Georgia, illustrate the Thoren Theory. Both had skied for about 15 years before attending Jeannie’s clinic.

“My skiing was at a real stalemate, and I thought I could benefit more from the lessons than the equipment changes,” says Susan, who grew up in small-town Georgia and started skiing at age 19.

Jeannie put Susan in smaller boots and on shorter skis. “Right away I felt more in control. Then she put me back on my old equipment. … I felt like I was wearing tennis shoes on ice.”

Marla’s story is similar. “I didn’t start downhill skiing until I was 37. Still, most of the time I was terrified.

“Jeannie totally transformed my skiing by canting my bindings, moving them forward and adding heel lifts to my boots. … My right leg is one inch longer than my left.” The issue had affected her skiing but was never addressed before Jeannie.

At 64, Marla skis five days a week and will tackle most Midwest hills.

Since 2005, Jeannie has a new role because somebody who could do something about skis finally listened. Now she designs skis for Dynastar, one of about 10 ski makers in the world. “At 60 I finally got what I wanted – a ski of my own,” she says.

As women’s category manager, she helped Dynastar create its Exclusive line – seven skis aimed, miracle of miracles, at women. The skis weigh 25 percent less than unisex skis and feature a raised heel and a forward binding mount.

“You have to understand in ski manufacturing, Jeannie’s not an insider,” says Tom. Instead, she’s been on the slopes watching women glide and turn. Dynastar has picked up on that experience and listened.

Jeannie couldn’t ask for better ears. “Dynastar has a reputation with first lift-last lift skiers,” says Tom, meaning the skiers who spend the most time on the mountain often wear Dynastars. Their factory, after all, sits at the base of Mont Blanc in Chamonix, France, the world capital of serious skiing.

Promoting the “Thoren Theory” on its website from Norway to Australia, the company endorses Jeannie’s vision to women worldwide.

After testing prototypes in the French Alps and in Utah, Jeannie knew she had the ski of her dreams. “These skis are like little sling shots. It’s the ski I’ve always wanted and it’s miraculous how great it turned out.”

Skiers don’t need to take the word of Jeannie or the Dynastar technicians.

In its September Buyer’s Guide, Ski magazine ranked Jeannie’s Dynastar Exclusive Carve higher than any ski in the category for Aspiring Expert, “smashing the competition in Short Turns and Rebound Energy.”

“Women control their speed by the shape of the turn,” she says, “and that’s what these skis do best – turn.”

Three designs influenced by her in other categories scored equally well.

Jeannie is also getting accolades. Three years in a row, she was named to the Top 100 Ski Instructors in America. She was inducted to the Skiing for Women Hall of Fame its first year. She made Ski’s Top 100 Most Influential Skiers of the Century and Skiing’s Top 25 Most Influential People in Skiing in the Last 50 Years.

North American Snowsports Journalists Association awarded her its Carson White Golden Quill Award for her outstanding contribution and lifetime devotion to skiing.

Jeannie believes Dynastar’s new skis will lead others into catering to women. “I hope by passing along my knowledge, I can save younger women 25 years of frustration.”

And while all the awards fuel Jeannie’s sense of accomplishment, they were never her goal.

“I didn’t start out to save the world,” says the Lake Superior woman. “I just wanted to be a better skier.”

Marquette writer Frida Waara is a longtime friend of Jeannie Thoren (and the Thoren Theory).