The beginning...

At a time when Dynastar is fighting for its life, I fondly remember how important that brand has been in my earlier ski years and I wanted to write its history, which by the way is available nowhere and is probably ignored by Dynastar’s current management.

Like its famous “moustache” logo introduced in 1966, borrowed from the coat of arms of Sallanches, France, where it’s been located since 1963, and that represents the meeting point of two small local streams, the brand had been a product of confluences between other brands, technical ideas and various ownerships.

I noticed the first pair of skis related to Dynastar in 1963 in the window of Alson Sports in Morzine, France. It was then branded “Starflex” and the model name was “Compound RG5,” the top was black phenol with clear resin sidewalls showing the fiberglass weaving. The product was made by a company called “Les Plastiques Synthétiques.”

These, aside from the “Fiberglass Jean Vuarnet” by Rossignol, were the first non-traditional wood or metal skis that I had ever seen. At the same time, Dynamic skis, which only made wood skis turned to Les Plastiques Synthétiques to design and develop its first torsion-box fiberglass ski for the 1964 Olympic Winter Games and the product that came out of that collaboration was no other than the now famous Dynamic VR7. For those sticklers with details, the “RG5” moniker meant “resin-glass, five years of development” while “VR7” almost meant the same in French with “verre-résine,” but this time the development time had somehow been bumped to seven years…

What’s more astonishing is that the Sallanches manufacturer wanted to create a legacy out of its collaborative work with Dynamic by subsequently changing its name from Starflex to Dynastar, a contraction between Dynamic and Starflex; it even stuck with the same lettering style, which goes a long way to say that Dynamic’s trademark attorney was probably asleep at the switch!

Sallanches must have been a hotbed of creativity when it came to naming products (more on that later...) Claude Joseph, the French distributor of Marker bindings, who at some point had his fingers into Starflex, named his line of ski poles Kerma, just by turning the Mar-ker name around!