Meet the Next Generation of Armada Freeride Skiers: Max Palm and Toby Rafford

When Armada decided to reemphasize its focus on freeride skiing and launch a new product line, it wanted a young flagship athlete to help lead the charge.

That ended up being Max Palm—the Swede who recently rocketed into the spotlight after landing the Freeride World Tour's (FWT) first-ever double backflip.

Born to Swedish parents but raised in France, Palm latched onto skiing—and eventually competitive freeride skiing—at a young age. When he was 15, he began competing, later becoming a junior champion and earning a wildcard that landed him on the FWT. Then came the double.

For the next three years, though, Palm’s relationship with competing was strained. He felt pressure and mostly opted out of freeride competitions last winter after a streak of crashes in 2024, but Palm told me that he wants to start competing again.

Last winter, he tested the waters in Alaska during the Natural Selection Tour, where his goal was to have as much fun as he could. “Not trying to send it too much, but just trying to do something really beautiful,” Palm said. “Now I'm super hungry to go back and really give it my all.”

Keep reading for more on Armada, Toby Rafford, and Max Palm's yet-to-be-released pro-model ski.

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Palm draws much of his inspiration from snowboarding, watching far more snowboard movies than he does ski movies. He also skateboards and tries to pepper the mountain with the same coping slashes he does on concrete, all while cloaked in loose outerwear, like a partially unzipped pink jacket.

Palm's latest short edit, GLÖMSKA 2, feels cool, a bit edgy, and representative of skiing's next generation. "He's extremely powerful, but he's extremely fluid," said Tony Gill, Armada's product marketing manager. "All the things that we like aesthetically in skiing, Max displays."

Freeride is a broad, amorphous genre, and one that isn't new for Armada. The brand's legendary ARG powder ski dates back to the aughts. Sammy Carlson, who left behind his park skiing roots years ago, has ridden for the brand for almost a decade. So has big mountain shredder Malou Peterson. Many of its other freestyle athletes have pivoted seamlessly into the backcountry as well. But Armada, even as it rolled out all-mountain chargers like those in the Declivity line, was—and still is—closely associated with the flavor of freestyle, park, and street skiing. That won't be changing anytime soon.

Still, Gill said he and the brand think they can add more to freeride, "both from a cultural standpoint, and also from a product development standpoint."

Part of that process involved enlisting another freeride-focused recruit, Toby Rafford, who made his FWT debut last winter. He'd signed with Armada ahead of the season, and Gill told me they were prepping a video to herald his arrival, but Rafford made his own introduction.

He took second at the first FWT stop of 2025 with a blistering run that included an enormous double flatspin. Armada was forced to acknowledge Rafford's signing because he was "standing on the podium wearing our shit," Gill said, laughing.

The FWT podium isn't a place where Armada gear usually appears.

While Tanner Hall podiumed at a FWT event in 2019, skiers riding Blizzard, HEAD, or Nordica are far more common. To Gill, the FWT is only a slice of the freeride skiing landscape, but he said Rafford's success put Armada in front of a new audience and validated the brand's equipment. Gill noted that the ARV 112—the ski Rafford prefers—is a true all-mountain ski, but it's often pigeonholed as a park ski. Rafford, using the ARVs, blasted through mixed snow and hit huge cliffs on the FWT, demonstrating that they're more than playful jib sticks.

Alongside representing Armada on the FWT and elsewhere, Palm and Rafford have been enlisted to help craft a new line of freeride skis that the brand will officially reveal later this winter. Rafford's more of a skier than an engineer, and readily admits that he hasn't mastered the technical side of ski design. So, he'll tell Gill and the design maestros how he wants a ski to feel, and they'll send him a new pair in a few weeks. That's exactly what Gill's looking for.

"We can take that [feedback], we can translate that into what the ski is actually doing, and hopefully produce gear that works better," he said.

Despite pitching in on that design process, Rafford is mostly married to his ARVs.

For Palm, the new ski is more personal—in part, he joined Armada to develop it. He's spent the past year skiing prototypes, and said the resulting product is everything he dreamt of. "It's gonna help my skiing progress so much," Palm said, adding that, true to character, the ski borrows design elements from snowboarding and surfing. Gill called it "a ski that you can absolutely give 'er hell on, but something that's still going to be fun and allow a variety of turn shapes."

The new product and the signing of Palm and Rafford won't mark the end of Armada's renewed freeride foray. The brand also brought big mountain skier Anne Wangler on board last winter. She previously skied for the freeride powerhouse Blizzard, and, with Armada, is participating in the ski design process.

Gill hinted that this roster of skiers will keep growing, with more news coming soon.

"We've always wanted to support the athletes who are pushing a vision of freeride that felt natural to us," he said.