Featured Picture: Sam Taggart
In one of many wildest headlines of the summer season, a former Atomic worker of the model’s manufacturing facility in Altenmarkt am Pongau, Austria has been accused of stealing 1,900 pairs of skis and reselling them.
Initially dropped at mild by Andreas Widmayer of the Salzburger Nachrichten newspaper, the story goes again a number of years however was solely not too long ago found. Widmayer printed his article earlier this month (August 2nd, 2024) saying that he discovered public courtroom paperwork from the Salzburg, Austria Public Prosecutors Workplace. Atomic was alerted of the continued theft and subsequently relieved the worker in query in November of 2023.
A police raid later revealed 300 pairs of skis stashed on the worker’s dwelling. Atomic filed costs towards the 57-year-old and an alleged confederate. The 2 now face potential jail sentences of as much as three years, studies Julia Schneemann of Snow Brains. The trial remains to be ongoing.
In keeping with Widmayer, the worker had begun this grand heist operation in August 2021, and for 2 and a half years, this particular person took skis with “minor defects” from the Manufacturing facility and offered them for 50 €. Whereas many model representatives or ski outlets will promote used demo gear on the finish of the season, with drill marks from previous bindings or different apparent imperfections, that is a lot completely different. These skis had been deemed faulty off the road, and Atomic had instructed the worker to get rid of them correctly.
If an organization knowingly sells faulty skis, they will oftentimes be held liable within the occasion of harm. In Colorado for instance, which noticed over 14 million ski space visits in the course of the 2023-24 winter, ski operators or product producers could be sued primarily based on a Negligence Commonplace or a Legal responsibility Commonplace. Atomic, which distributes over a million pairs of skis to 49 nations yearly, has to stick to strict guidelines in terms of negligence and legal responsibility regarding its merchandise since they’re unfold throughout so many alternative authorized jurisdictions.
Whereas the case remains to be on going, the entire ordeal raises an excellent query; do large outside firms know the place their faulty gear goes? Might or not it’s getting filtered into their common product stream? This worker at Atomic was clearly not simply mixing skis in and promoting them like another pair, however they had been capable of sneak away lots of and lots of of pairs over the course of 36 months with out being seen.
That is essential as a result of, not like many different world producers, the gear that outside firms produce can have life-or-death penalties related to it. If a ski, beacon, climbing rope, life jacket or different software is flawed, it might probably result in a lethal final result. Clearly, Atomic acted swiftly and professionally in stopping this rip-off artist, however the ordeal begs the query; will this be the final time we hear about somebody making an attempt to revenue off of life-threatening merchandise?
