INTRODUCTION: The International Ski and Snowboard federation (FIS) has banned fluorinated wax since winter 2023/2024 for health and environmental reasons [1]. Athletes must proceed to the inspection of their skis before each run to ensure no fluorine wax was used during the preparation. This control is currently done by infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) at three different points of the ski [2]. Very limited amount of wax can significantly improve the gliding performance [3]. One may thus wonder what the distribution of the wax onto the ski base is and what detection sensitivity should be attained for effective regulations? METHODS: After cutting the ski into pieces, waxed ski bases were observed with a scanning electronic microscope (SEM) equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) detector. When observed under an electron beam, a material emits X-rays with energies specific to the atoms it contains This technique allows the recognition of elemental constituents and their distribution mapping on the surface is possible on the SEM image. It requires that the wax contain different elements than the ski (carbon). Skis were prepared with a classical cross-country competition procedure. Different ski bases with different fluorinated waxes were analyzed. The effect of grinding with the absence or presence of a linear structure on the ski base was also investigated. RESULTS/DISCUSSION: The presence of fluorine is very scattered. The distribution of wax is very variable with the ski base and the wax nature. Ski base with graphite seems to retain less wax than no graphite containing with a presence of only small cluster of fluor. PFA wax seems to be present only in small grooves parallel to the direction of skiing. This effect appears also on grinded ski even if it can be noticed an increase in the surface density in holes of the structure. It can be explained by the several brushing of the ski to remove the excess of wax. Wax containing molybdenum either dispersed in PFA or paraffin are distributed in small cluster. CONCLUSION: EDX is a suitable way to analyze wax qualitatively by detection of non-carbon elements such as fluorine and molybdenum. EDX-mapping is a powerful tool to measure the distribution of wax on the ski base. The distribution of wax can be very different depending on the ski base and the wax nature. However, it can be noticed the wax is mostly in grooves parallel to the sliding direction.
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