Olympics-No more ski cuts: U.S entrepreneur on a mission after near-fatal crash

By Alan Baldwin

Jan 22 (Reuters) – Victor Wiacek brandishes a sharpened machete and drags it repeatedly across a thin layer of stretchy fabric on his forearm to demonstrate the material’s cut-resistant qualities.

The 27-year-old American has already sawed at the same extended arm, inserted into a pair of leggings, with a kitchen knife and a larger filleting blade without either implement leaving a mark.

Wiacek, founder of underwear brand VIX Protection, lost half the blood in his body and nearly died in a horrific ski accident while racing for his college in 2019 and is on a mission.

He wants to make ski lacerations — the potentially fatal cuts caused by razor-sharp edges in crashes and even everyday slow-speed accidents on the slopes — a thing of the past.

“This is the only injury we can virtually eliminate from the sport,” he told Reuters in a video interview from his New York base as the ski world prepares for February’s Milano Cortina Olympics.

Wiacek said lacerations were the fourth most common skiing injury — after broken bones, head trauma, and torn ligaments — yet often considered to be freak accidents.

“We can’t do a whole lot about head trauma, we could wear helmets and mitigate the injuries, but we’re never going to eliminate those. Torn ACLs, we can stretch before we go skiing… for broken bones I don’t know,” he said.

“But by wearing this garment, we can essentially eliminate an entire category of injury. That’s unheard of in the sport. And I think a really, really exciting opportunity to explore.”

MANDATORY FOR THE OLYMPICS

The governing FIS has made cut-resistant undergarments mandatory, from the waist down, in all Alpine disciplines from this season at the World Cup and Olympics.

That could extend to the whole body, with Wiacek’s company — one of several to offer solutions — working on neck guards and long-sleeve undershirts to provide a barrier from helmet to boot.

The move follows gashes suffered by top skiers, including U.S. great Mikaela Shiffrin’s partner Aleksander Aamodt-Kilde who is still recovering from a downhill crash in Wengen two years ago.

Fellow-Norwegian Aksel Lund Svindal, a double Olympic champion now coach to U.S. speed queen Lindsey Vonn, had a 15cm groin and abdominal laceration when he crashed in Beaver Creek, Colorado, in 2007.

“When a superstar injures themselves like Kilde did, it’s another kind of eye-opener for people to see ‘OK, I really need to wear this stuff’,” FIS director of men’s race operations Mike Kertesz told Reuters.

He likened skiing without protective underwear to skiing without a helmet and said he made sure his kids wore it whenever on the piste.

“In my opinion, we need to cover all parts of the body,” he added. “As an athlete, when you’re falling and your ski comes off it’s not attached to you anymore. It can cut you in the upper body or lower body. It doesn’t matter.”

BLOOD-SPATTERED GOGGLES

Wiacek’s story starts with a race in upstate New York while studying at Babson College, Massachusetts.

A skier since the age of two, and always accepting the likelihood of injury, he had suffered cuts previously that required stitches and rest but this time was different.

The slope was unassuming, not particularly steep, and he was carrying very little speed onto the flats when he lost control and a binding ejected.

The loose ski came to rest on its side ahead of him, and he fell on it. 

“I practically rode the whole ski from tail to tip,” he said. “My vision went red because there was blood on my goggles. It turned out that I had cut my thigh so deep all the way down to the femur.

“I cut my thigh, cut through all the muscular tissue there, the nerves, the IT (iliotibial) band, and apparently I just nicked the femoral artery and I was losing blood ridiculously quickly.”

Wiacek was fortunate it happened near where the coaches were standing, one equipped with a military-grade tourniquet.

Recovering in hospital,  where he was flown in by helicopter after receiving blood at a smaller clinic on the way, he drew inspiration amidst the trauma. Always interested in materials science, he looked for a solution on his laptop.

He then bought and tested every cut-resistant product he could find, learning and refining.

“I don’t want to say it was some kind of divine intervention or meant to be, but truly it felt immediately like this was my purpose,” he said.

“I’ve got people to laugh at me for this, but I genuinely think the only reason I survived that day was because I had a purpose to fulfil.”

Wiacek works with the FIS and U.S. ski team among many others and has sought advice from former champion Bode Miller, who suffered a leg cut by an edge in 2015.

Breezy Johnson, who won downhill gold for the U.S. team at the 2025 world championships, benefited after an incident in Switzerland last season where another racer ran into her while training.

The sharp ski edge sliced her race suit but did not penetrate the undergarment, leaving Johnson only bruised.

Wiacek said the fear of being out for days or weeks because of a cut was more of an incentive for many top-level skiers to use his leggings than the risk of bleeding to death. Ultimately, however, most needed no persuasion.

“Frankly, just a photo of my gruesome leg gash was all the marketing that I needed to tell people that this is something that’s really serious,” he said.

(Writing by Alan Baldwin, additional reporting by Julien Pretot in Val Gardena, editing by Toby Davis)