After SpongeBob SquarePants ripped Sand Mountain, he realized he needed boots to suit his square toes—had he been lucky enough to try on the new Fischer Premio BOA he would have been comfortably ready to shred, three times over. Testers say this is the best wide ride from Fischer they’ve ever skied and claim that it offers the broadest, squarest toebox in the business!
While a lot of skiers may envision the narrow and aggressively raked-forward RC4 line-up when they think of Fischer boots. The Premio range offers a counter-argument to that racy end of the boot spectrum—it’s a wide, wide with an upright stance and a tall-feeling cuff that begs for big, heavy dudes with potato-shaped feet (that’s how one tester described the ideal Premio candidate) to come to the high-volume party and fill up this punchbowl of a boot with thick foot flesh. Testers said the tested 130-flex could handle the biggest, widest feet attached to the biggest, widest guy and take him all around the mountain in stable, supported style. The 130- and 120-flexes are available all the way up to a 32.5, so XXXL skiers need to look no further than Premio, our team suggested.
A lot of wide boots claim to offer a modern, square, or obliquely-shaped toebox—most of those assertions are aspirational—but the new Premio delivers on this, internally and externally. Testers said you see it first—it’s obviously blunt and squared-off—but testers say you also instantly feel how spacious the internal toebox fit is. The piggies are capable of a full-sprawl, mud pit style, and testers said they were all as happy as a pig in, well, you know. Testers thought the lower shell BOA closure worked well to fine-tune the fit around the foot and said it offered a good range of adjustment for a variety of foot volumes without distorting the shape of the shell.
The Premio’s liner is interesting for three main things—one, that it marries so well with the lower shape of the boot shell, affording maximum toe and forefoot spread from the get-go, as well as enhancing the shell’s vaulted ceilings to provide maximum overhead clearance for thick insteps.
The other thing about the liner is the thick, longitudinal rib that runs up the front of the tongue, which fills the notorious free-play gap between the tongue and the plastic cuff’s wrap around the front of it. Testers loved how their forward flexing moves instantly translated into ski shovel response, rather than getting lost in translation due to a gappy linkage at the front of the leg.
The last and possibly best thing about the liner, for our flashback-prone test team, is the trippy 3-dimensional-cosmetic exterior material—the well-sculpted heel and ankle area looks almost holographic and testers were pretty sure it had been provided to Fischer by a visiting alien spacecraft. It was hard to convince testers to stop staring, put the liners back in the boots and go ski them.
But ski them they did, and they were impressed. The boot is reliable from turn to turn, without any failure of flex under duress from our larger testers (one is 6-foot, 230-pounds) and it remained stable at speed regardless of the snow surface or ski width. Quickness was there for the guys who approached a proper fit by virtue of their thick feet, but the low volume guys said the potential for greatness was obvious to them, just unattainable without adding many more pairs of socks to fill up the Premio’s cavernous interior. Some testers thought that the upright stance angle, tall-feeling cuff and legit 130-flex made getting forward a challenge for all but big, tall guys. They noted that the 120-flex would likely over-perform by virtue of the same design elements mentioned above, and it’s available for 100-bucks less.
As a final aside, premio means prize or award in romance languages, and our testers thought this was apropos, accurately foreshadowing the gold medal they gave it.
