Tele Dribble: A Defense of the G3 Targa Binding

The Targa was a best-seller, with a ubiquitousness that made it the definitive telemark equipment of the roaring late-nineties. Looking back on its success, Craig Dostie, who covered the Targa’s rise extensively in his seminal magazine Couloir, notes that the binding indeed marked an improvement over what came before, even compared to the eminent Rainey Designs’ SuperLoop, a revolutionary 75mm model. The Targa “offered equal performance to SuperLoop for turning, was easier to latch on, and did not rip out of skis as easily as the SuperLoop did.”

While the Targa may not have been the darling of the cutting edge–many felt it piggybacked on Russel Rainey’s SuperLoop and its pioneering use of compression springs–the Targa nonetheless was a mainstay, and received positive reviews for years after its release. “For those who prefer a neutral feel to their tele binding, there are several choices, but none that give you all the other features that Targa does,” Couloir’s 2001 product review stated. And in their 2005 gear guide, Backcountry noted the Targa’s “other features like soft cables, long-travel compression cartridges and a forward pivot point continue to make this a favorite among skiers who like smooth, more neutral flexing bindings.”

Moreover, the popularity of the Targa was instrumental in spurring further development in telemark bindings. “Targa spawned Black Diamond’s Pitbull which helped inspire the Hammerhead which motivated Ted Ayliffe to respond with what became Black Diamond’s O2,” Dostie says, continuing that “the use of compression springs in Voile bindings was not adopted until after the popularity of the Targa was noted.”

The brand eventually introduced other iterations on the platform, including the Targa Ascent, a free-pivoting touring model, which won the ISPO Best Outdoor Innovation in the Hardware Category in January of 2006.

But the Targa would eventually become the target of scorn–not only from a skiing public that would soon cast telemark aside, but even from within the free-heel scene itself that came to find it lacking. “It may have offered superior mounting integrity, but the cables were notorious for breaking. As were the aluminum toe bars,” Dostie says. “And there were definitely more active bindings made–SuperLoop version three, then Hammerhead.”

A Controversial Design?

As the model’s preeminence slowly faded with time, the ire against the Targa would evolve, eventually casting it as a leading symbol of stagnation in the telemark subculture itself. “The Targa truly sucks. I'll go so far as to say it's a big reason why the trope of telemark = license to suck exists,” a forum user and former telemark writer posted several years ago to BackcountryTalk.com. “It's more than how the binding operates on the slope. It is a severely flawed, inferior design that puts all the stress on the weakest component, and it’s a mystery to me why it became so popular.”

In turn, the modern newschool telemark scene has taken to using the Targa as the chief symbol of a bygone era they see as curmudgeonly and stodgy. When detailing his club’s presence and goals–including positive community-building initiatives like teaching people to telemark and giving them access to gear–University of Vermont telemark club president Nikhil Barnick still took the Targa down a peg, telling Adam Sauerwein and CJ Coccia on the “Pretty Good Telemark Show” that, in the end, he hoped to “to show people that tele isn’t always a 45-50 year old dad sport,” before adding that “not all of us have G3 Targas.” A take echoed by others in the revivalist newschool telemark world.

Telemark, in gear and ethos, has certainly moved on from the Targa. And it’s better for that. A new vibe, and, arguably more importantly, a slew of modern telemark gear options proliferate, marking a new day that telemark has long pined for. But it's one that was indelibly influenced by many prior innovations, not least of all, the Targa.

But the binding instead has the woeful reality of not only being constantly looked back on in hindsight with eyes accustomed to modern telemark gear and culture, it’s had the unfortunate fate of becoming the symbol of telemark stasis–something the model little deserves considering it was actually quite important at a time when newly available aggressive plastic boots otherwise had few suitable binding choices. And its latter day lowly standing–undoubtedly based on a perceived connection with elder, cranky skiers clutching to their old gear–is all the more unfair as it casts a shadow on the binding, but also an entire cohort and time period that was indeed pivotal for telemark, divisively typecasting it all as antithetical to the perceived loftier modern version of the sport.

To this day, the Targa is eminently skiable, and the negative discussion around it doesn’t so much exemplify a lowly piece of gear or how the cadre still skiing it deserves a comeuppance, but more so that the dialogue on telemark so often misses the point. Free-heel skiing is by its nature countercultural, it is to tread outside the established path. To frame the discussion on such an endeavor around cool-or-die mandates and a wear-this-not-that ethos degrades what telemark is all about: going out on one’s own to make the sweetest turn, in the process often serendipitously finding freedom from the mainstream. This dialogue does little to give credence to how important the Targa was in its time. It offered telemark a model to rally around at its height, and granted a quintessentially telemark feeling many loved.

And many still do, skiing on that classic telemark trap known for its bright red color and near ubiquity some 25 years ago that is still with the sport in many ways.