SALOMON SABOTAGE SNOWBOARD 2013/14 REVIEW

The Salomon Sabotage has been British rider Jamie Nicholls’ board of choice for a few years now. Perhaps unusually for a top pro, he prefers to ride one board for almost everything, from slaying street rails in Quebec or err… Leeds, to poaching pow laps in between his competition runs (the cheeky bugger). The fact that this one board can handle all of that says a fair bit about its versatility. Yes it’s a park board, but it’s one you can ride elsewhere too.

Like the Assassin, Salomon have used aspen for the Sabotage’s core, and they’ve tweaked it in the same way, with beefed up sections along the length where you need it for ollie power. This also features the brand’s ‘royal rubber pad’ dampening, which helps absorb vibrations at speed and soak up heavy landings – pretty much essential if you’re going to hit the kind of kickers Jamie does. The profile is a slight variation on camber (it has a flat section between the feet) which gives the board a responsive feel – shift your weight onto your toes and you can feel the contact points biting in in a way you can’t on some rocker boards. It’s also pretty stiff.

While that’s great for hitting Nicholls-sized rails, for us mere mortals it’ll be a bit too stiff to butter onto boxes. The upshot of this is that it’s stable at speed, and our test team had a lot of fun hooning it down the piste without a wobble in sight. In their comments they mentioned “power in and out of turns” and the “stability on the edge when carving” as well as its ability to handle big kickers. If you want something that carves well, and handles big kickers easily, give the Sabotage a go.

BUY THIS BOARD AT: snowboard-asylum.com, subvertboardstore.com, snowandrock.com, boardridersguide.com, thesnowboardshop.co.uk, snowfit.co.uk

Have you ridden this board? Got any comments that your fellow riders might find useful? Please add your reviews below.