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The story behind
VIX Protection
After a ski-edge laceration nearly ended his life, Victor Wiacek set out to make the protection he couldn’t find.
Where it began/February 3, 2019
The reason VIX exists.
In February 2019, Victor was racing GS at West Mountain in upstate New York, going no more than 25 mph by his own estimate, when he fell across his own ski. The edge cut his thigh to the bone and nicked his femoral artery. He lost about half the blood in his body within minutes, and survived because two coaches and a ski patroller got tourniquets on his leg before help arrived.
“I practically rode the whole ski from tail to tip. My vision went red because there was blood on my goggles.”Victor Wiacek
During recovery, he started looking for the protection he would have wanted to wear that day. To his disbelief, however, he couldn't find a single option he trusted. So he began working on one himself.
2019 onward/Testing and measurement
Test. Measure. Repeat.
Victor found a problem no one had solved: there was no ski-specific, repeatable way to measure what happened when a moving edge met fabric. If protection couldn’t be measured, he couldn’t know whether to trust it.
So he built the first ski-specific cut-resistance testing machine, then worked with FIS to create the FIS-DITF 2021 test. That process has since grown to 387 fabric combinations and 29 testing machines—all in pursuit of protection racers would actually wear.
2020 onward/Real-world iteration
Built with racers.
Even while the lab work continued, VIX left the workshop. A small, waitlist-led launch in February 2020 drew hundreds of messages and orders. By that fall, athletes in the first versions were already showing up at the World Cup.
What began as Victor’s project became a product shaped alongside the people wearing it. Paula Moltzan and Nina O’Brien helped inform the women’s design; later, athletes including Breezy Johnson kept feeding the next round of testing—changing fit, coverage, mobility, and feel.
VIX was no longer Victor’s project alone.
2025/The current flagship
Five stars. One standard.
Years of laboratory testing and World Cup feedback converged in 2025, when VIX became the first brand to earn the maximum five-star FIS certification.
That same process produced today’s flagship VIX leggings: the highest level of measured protection, engineered to move and feel like the base layer racers already want to wear.
The first brand to earn the maximum five-star FIS certification
2025–2027/From the top outward
Sparking a revolution.
At the same time VIX earned the first five-star rating, FIS introduced its first cut-resistant mandate. Beginning with the 2025/26 season, pants rated at least three stars became mandatory at the top levels of the sport—from the World Cup and Olympic Winter Games through the Continental Cups.
In 2026/27, that mandate expands to every FIS Alpine event, including Level 2+ races and FIS Masters. What began with one racer searching for protection—and a standard proven at the top—is moving outward through the entire sport.
VIX will keep pushing that movement forward the same way it began: listening to racers, measuring everything, and building protection they will actually wear.
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Understand the options, prepare for the new FIS rules, or choose the right VIX protection for your season.
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