History
The first step toward the modern snowboard was the "Snurfer," a contraction of "snow surfer," originally designed by Sherman Poppen in 1965 for his own children. Poppen began manufacturing and marketing the Snurfer as a children's toy in 1966. It was essentially a wheel-less skateboard, steered with a hand-held rope.
It remained a children's toy for more than ten years, but during the mid to late 1970s several pioneers independently became involved in developing snowboards. Chief among them were Dimitrije Milovich and Jake Burton Carpenter.
Milovich was a surfer who worked as a waiter. During his breaks, he experimented with sliding over the snow on plastic cafeteria trays. From those experiments came a new type of snowboard called the Winterstick. Although featured in Newsweek magazine in March of 1975, it wasn't a commercial success.
Carpenter had a Snurfer when he was young. While in college, he was one of a group of students who started Snurfer racing as a kind of joke to pass some boring hours. After he attached a strap to his board, he won consistently. That was the first foot retention device for a snowboard.
In 1977, Carpenter founded Burton Boards in Londonderry, Vermont, and experimented continually with new materials and designs. Eventually, he was building a snowboard made of steam-bent wood and fiberglass, with high-back bindings and metal edges. Carpenter also made a major contribution by publicizing snowboarding as a lifestyle sport.
Other snowboard manufacturing pioneers were Mike Olsen and Tom Sims. As an eighth-grader, Sims built a snowboard as a winter alternative to his skateboard. After years of improvements, he opened Sims Snowboards in 1977. Olsen made his first snowboard that year, when he a high school student. He dropped out of college in 1984 to found a manufacturing company called Gnu. A 1985 article about Olsen and Gnu in Powder magazine gave snowboarding a major boost among skiers.
As skiers and skateboarders took up the sport, though, most ski areas didn't. Early snowboards were difficult to control and they were generally banned. (The fact that skateboarders brought their aggressive techniques, baggy clothing, and counter-culture hairstyles into the sport certainly didn't help.)
Only 7 percent of U. S. ski areas allowed snowboarding in 1985. As boards improved and traditional skiing stagnated, though, snowboarding gradually became more acceptable. Most ski areas had set aside slopes for snowboarders by 1990. Now, about 97 percent of all ski areas in North America allow snowboarding and more than half of them have half-pipes.
The number of snowboarders inceased from about 2 million in 1990 to more than 7 million in 2000. According to industry projections, snowboarders will outnumber skiers by 2012.
The U. S. Amateur Snowboarding Association (USASA) was incorporated in 1988 to standardize rules of competition and organize competitive events and held the first national championships in February of 1990.
In 1989, the International Snowboard Association was founded to organize races in Japan, North America, and Europe in cooperation with the Pro Snowboarders Association. The ISA became the International Snowboarding Federation (ISF) in 1990.
A push soon began to have snowboarding accepted as an Olympic sport. That could be done, however, only if it became a skiing discipline, since there were not enough national governing bodies for snowboarding to qualify as a separate sport. As a result, the Federation Internationale du Ski (FIS), which governs international skiing, began conducting a World Cup series in the 1993-94 winter season.
In 1995, the International Olympic Committee voted to add snowboarding to the 1998 Olympics and recognized the FIS as the world governing body. The U. S. Ski Association became the national governing body and added "Snowboarding" to its name. Although the USASA still exists as an organizing and sanctioning body, the ISF folded in 2002 for lack of support.
Snowboarders are split into two major groups, which is reflected in two distinct kinds of competition. Skiers who took up the sport adapted ski racing events to snowboarding, while skateboarders developed freestyle, in which competitors perform tricks and are juidged on style and technical.
The racing events are slalom, giant slalom, and super G (for super giant slalom). In slalom, boarders race downhill through gates that force tight turns, requiring at least as much technical skill as speed.
Giant slalom uses a longer course with gates set farther apart, resulting in higher speeds. Super G is the fastest of all, with speeds of up to 45 miles an hour.
The newest snowboarding event is snowboardcross, in which four to six riders race through an obstacle course that includes moguls and jumps. The first two or three finishers advance to the next round of competition.
Freestyle events include big air, the half-pipe, and slopestyle. In big air competition, competitors launch from a ramp or hill and perform stunts in mid-air. They're judged on height, distance, difficulty, and landing.
The half-pipe is a semi-circular ditch, 12 to 15 feet deep, in which boarders can perform tricks while going from one side to the other and while in the air above one of the walls.
In slopestyle, competitors do their tricks while going down a hill, around obstacles and over moguls.
Only the slalom and the half-pipe are Olympic events.
