The 2004 US National 10K classic championships, on January 5th, was a good day for me. That was a day when the whole field was on klister, and I made great skis using Rex orange binder with a homemade hardwax pre-mix. Somehow I had ended up doing skis for a visiting Norwegian, Øystein Rønbeck, and he was thrilled to be second. But the big news on the day was the ascent of the visiting Canadian men who had a strong presence at the top end of the scoreboard. At the time the Canadians hadn’t been too hot against the US guys, so this marked a change. The word around the parking lot after the race was that most of the Canadians had been on Vauhti klister. Prior to that I had been aware of the Vauhti name, but that day was the first day that I was aware of Vauhti kicking butt. I started paying more attention.
When Amy, Gunnar and I moved to Canada for a couple of years in the Fall of 2007 we figured out WHY the Vauhti line was well known in Canada. Seppo Lappalainen was the owner of Canadian Wintersport, and the distributor of Vauhti. Seppo is a force of nature – there’s no better way to put it. After we had been up there for a little while he called me up, out of the blue, and within a few weeks I had a full test kit of Vauhti kick waxes. I had also started doing some World Cup service work with the US Ski Team, and saw the Vauhti stuff getting used at World Cups. Over the four years since I started working with Seppo’s test wax I had really started to depend on the Vauhti line – particularly on the kick side of things.
When we moved back to Vermont I emailed Seppo asking about getting some Vauhti product into the US. Several days later he and his wife Raili arrived at our house with a box of wax and the keys to the kingdom. We hadn’t exactly planned to get into the wax business, but you can’t say no to Seppo, and we wanted the Vauhti line in our hands. So here we are.
Vauhti Kick Wax
This kick wax is what really captured our interest from the start.