SKI BOOT FITTING CONSPIRACY THEORIES

And god said to skiers, “Thou shalt encase thy feet in plastic casts that impede the normal anatomical function of those body parts…” and it was painful. Face it, our feet weren’t made for ski boots, and no matter how good they get, they still hurt. Especially at this time of year. Especially if you’re one of those unlucky souls that has to break new ones in this season. But fret not, you can pay that specialty store $500 to punch the poop out of your $1,000 shells, toss out your stock liner, fit you with a $300 custom one, and it’ll all feel about 20 per cent better! This, folks, is what our ancestors called a good old-fashioned racket. There are few sports that have spawned as witch-doctor-y a practice as boot fitting. Those snake-oil sellers are quick to flash their kinesiology degrees or wave a model foot skeleton in your face and say things like, “Your navicular needs more room to pronate.” Hogwash! Most of the time you just need a good few weeks of toughening up. While ski boots aren’t natural, the human animal was made to adapt to anything—without the help of mainstream medicine. So this season, we’re launching our anti-fit campaign, which we’re confident will gain its rightful place in history next to the now well-accepted anti-vax movement. Here’s our list of reasons not to get your boots fitted, ever! —MATT COTÉ

• Boot fitters are historically associated with the Freemasons, who are part of the Illuminati, who are reptiles from the fourth dimension, and everybody knows it.

• Vail Resorts is buying up boot-fitting shops while it also has a controlling interest in a major bottled water company that uses an additive to cause bone spurs.

• Most of those athletes who tag their local boot-fitting shops on social media actually have bionic feet; they’re just helping collect civilian foot data for the military.

• Candide Thovex doesn’t exist and never did. He’s a hologram, designed to make you feel bad about your skiing, so you’ll keep trying to get better-fitting boots.

• Justin Trudeau’s campaign was funded by boot fitters purposely doing bad work because they’re in league with the snowboard industry and want you to convert.

• Everyone thinks airplanes spread chemtrails of aluminum particles to give people Alzheimer’s disease and squash political dissent, but it’s actually so we forget how much our boots hurt each year.

• Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election— American boot fitters did. Trump had privately pledged tariffs against Canada to get them back to work after cure-all Intuition Liners flooded their market.

• The science isn’t at all clear that our feet even have bones, there’s no consensus.

• Boot fitters have long had the technology to create free-energy machines that Nikola Tesla first envisioned a hundred years ago. They withhold it so you’ll get cramps on slow chairlifts.

• If you let your town have a boot fitting shop, Sharia law will follow.

• The flat-Earth theory was developed by boot fitters as a means to make more money off of custom canting your unnecessary race boots.

• The artificial polymers in ski boots were designed by Monsanto to break down and crack after three seasons.

• Cannabis cures ski boot problems, and always has.

• The sasquatch isn’t the missing link, he’s a Quebecer that got in a spat with an Albertan boot fitter in the ’60s who made his boots irremovable. Poor old Serge has had to live in the wild ever since, and that’s just what he looks like now.

• The moon landing did happen in 1969, but Neil Armstrong was wearing prototype Raichle Flexons, 21 years before the public got them. Mysteriously, they haven’t changed in all that time, and boot fitters hate them.

• Eric Hjorleifson wasn’t actually born in Canmore, Alberta. He’s from Roswell, New Mexico, and somehow, without a formal education, is better at ski-boot engineering than any other “human.”

• To help move around the mountains, Al-Qaeda secretly developed the second-most anatomically correct ski boot in history (after the Raichle Flexon), so boot fitters plotted 9/11 and blamed it on them.

• Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot JFK, a rogue group of boot fitters did, because JFK saw early plans for rear-entry boots, and tried to stop them.

• Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails weren’t benign, they contained classified secrets on the anatomy of Lindsey Vonn’s feet. Now Russian boot fitters have those.

• Elvis is alive and well, fitting boots in Reno, Nevada. Stop giving him business and he’ll have to sing again.

• Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966, and was replaced by a lookalike who doesn’t sound nearly as good. The real McCartney was on his way to get his boots fitted when he died.

• The pyramids weren’t built by slaves, but a technologically advanced alien civilization that harnessed cosmic power for healing. When Egypt got into sand skiing, the first boot fitters sabotaged the pyramids so skiers’ feet would hurt for the next 4,000 years.

• The Bermuda Triangle is a red herring to distract us from the real black hole: every till in every boot-fitting shop in the world.