The Salomon medium width, all-mountain boot (aka S/Pro Supra in current model parlance) has been a favorite of our women's boot test team for several years. A couple seasons ago we saw the first iteration of BOA appear on the lower shell of the Supra and aside from a slight hindrance to entry, the new closure system worked for our team. The two seasons following showed Salomon's early-adoption of the reel and subsequent improvements to be a success, and now they've doubled-down on BOA, literally, with it both down and up. Hey, if one is good, two must be twice as good, right?
Testers say yes, that's right. And with Salomon's (and most other dual BOA brands) positioning of two BOAs as the pinnacle of combined performance and convenience, this year the women's S/Pro Supra Dual BOA is offered at a 115-flex level, which we tested. The 115-flex Supra isn't available in any other way--if you want the mack daddy model, or mack mommy, you get two reels.
And our test team was perfectly fine with that. They're suckers for a boot that skis well, and this one does, they say. One tester said it had an "electric-feeling, snappy back-and-forth energy" that a skier could tap into at the highest levels of descent performance or choose to keep it throttled-back to lower, cruising RPM's just as easily. Testers weren't sure whether the cuff's power and snap were derivative of the upper BOA's cable-pulley mechanical advantage or simply a byproduct of the close wrap it put on their lower leg (some of both, they proposed), but they were effusive in their praise for how well the Dual BOA Supra tipped skis on edge and kept them in line through unruly terrain at borderline unsafe speeds.
The fore-aft positioning and action of the cuff was similarly praiseworthy. One tester said, "The cuff works together in perfect harmony with the shell, offering the perfect balance of a powerful, progressive flex with a snug foot-feel to produce an ultimate level of response." That sounds pretty good to us. More than one tester loved-on the S/Pro Supra Dual BOA 115 W's flex feel and stiff-strong, fore-aft positioning (but no comments of a brick-like or rigid feel). It's Edge Power score was one of the highest of all tested women's models, across all categories, at a 9.75.
The fit of the Dual BOA 115 was similarly positioned toward the performance-side of things. Testers said this was one of the tightest of the medium-width, all-mountain group. They liked its closely-contoured and snug grip on every nook and cranny, saying it worked for the flex-tier and price point. But several testers mentioned that the toebox in particular was more snug than they'd like in a typical medium width fit. One said it put a mammogram-style smash, top-down, on the little piggies, which mirrored what other testers had to say as well. The fit did improve with wear time and sweat, testers reported, and accordingly, its on-snow fit score beat its initial, out-of-box fit score, 9.75 to 9.00.
Testers were in agreement that the entry and exit were not this boot's best qualities, but for the target audience they didn't think it would cause too much consternation, and they said that the fit and performance, once in, was well worth that trade-off.
Kudos
Caveats