Imagine yourself carving an impressive curved swath across a slope of fresh snow as skeins of glittering powder ice explode around you, leaving iridescent clouds of glittering ice in their wake that slowly cascade to the ground. Snowboarding is great.
For lovers of this winter sport, these last four words explain everything. From its humble beginnings in the 1960s as a children’s toy, snowboarding has grown into the Olympic event and twisted extreme sport we know today. Snowboarding is one of the fastest growing winter sports and it shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Modern snowboarding goes directly back to the 1965 invention of Sherman Poppen, a chemical engineer who built a new snow toy for his young daughter by joining two skis together and tying a rope to the front to hold them together. His daughter loved it and all his friends wanted one too, so Poppen decided to license the idea to a manufacturer. His wife came up with a name for the new product, and in 1966 “The Snurfer” became a minor sensation, selling over half a million units.
The next big development was in 1972 when Dimitije Milovich, an East Coast surf enthusiast, founded the Winterstick Company and began building snowboards. Milovich had built his first snowboard in 1969 based on a surfboard design, and by 1974 he had two “Snow Surfboard” patents and was selling snowboards out of his store in Salt Lake City.
In the late 1970s, the innovative new sport of snowboarding was led by two legendary men, Jake Burton Carpenter and Tom Sims, who helped bring the sport into mainstream consciousness. Burton was an East Coaster who refined the idea of the Snurfer and sold what he called “Burton Boards”, while Sims was a West Coast skateboarding icon who sold his own version of a ski-like “ski board”. skateboard without wheels Both men were driven to commercialize their concepts and became involved in a sometimes bitter rivalry that propelled snowboarding into a mass-market phenomenon.
Throughout the 1980s, snowboarding grew exponentially, as new snowboard products hit the market and ever-innovative snowboarders invented new ways to ride them. At first, the serious world of winter sport skiing didn’t know what to do with all these scruffy youngsters showing up on the slopes with their boards, and many slopes banned snowboarders. But by the late 1980s, all of that had changed as the sport continued to grow in popularity and began to attract major corporate sponsorships for organized competitions. By 1998, snowboarding debuted at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and has shown no signs of slowing down since.