Nowadays skiing and snowboarding are both popular alpine sports across the globe but it hasn’t always been that simple. While downhill skiing has been around for yonks (since about 1850) and Nordic skiing for even longer, snowboarding is still a brand new sport in comparison so it is understandable that there has been some discomfort amongst old skool skiers that simply can’t get their heads around it! Today skiing and snowboarding work side by side. The two sports have influenced each other in terms of development and now boundaries are being pushed and technologies are ever advancing which can only be positive in relation to the progression of both sports.

Snowboard History

Sherman Poppen invented the ‘Snurfer’ in the late 60s for his daughter by connecting two skis together and attaching a rope to the nose to hold onto. Within the next ten years, a million Snurfers were sold. After Dimitrije Milovich started a company called Wintersticks producing a couple of boards that combined the concepts of surfing and skiing, word really started to get out about this new way of getting down a mountain.

Jake Burton and his early snowboard

Jake Burton was a college graduate at this time and having had a go on the Snurfer, decided to make his own wooden board with bindings more like the ones used today. He entered competitions on his new toy and found he was miles ahead of his competitors because of the fact that he was fixed to his board. There are some conflicting stories but the general consensus is that Jake Burton was always the forerunner in terms of development from this stage on. In 1980 he built a board with a P-Tex base and incorporated more ski technologies. Now he owns the biggest snowboard brand out there – Burton – which has been the market leader for some time.

Skiing vs snowboarding

Skiers and snowboarders unite

Even when snowboarding became a sport of its own back in the days of those quality fluro one pieces (the 80s) it was banned from many ski resorts, as late as 1985 only thirty-nine ski resorts out of around six hundred allowed snowboarding at all. To this day there are still some resorts in the US that do not allow snowboarders on their slopes, the well known resort of Aspen, Colorado only gave at the beginning of the 2001/02 winter season. French legend Regis Rolland who stared in the first snowboard movie Apocalypse I and who has more recently developed his own snowboard brand APO, seemed to influence popularity further in Europe and the sport was seen to be ‘cooler’ than skiing. This is where the competition begun, snowboarders and skiers were competing for space on the slopes. Snowboarding was seen as a little kamikaze, out of control and dangerous by skiers who had been used to quieter and more refined pistes to themselves for so long. In 1994 a television programme in the US,  American Journal announced that snowboarders where “knocking down skiers like bowling pins”… Snowboarding was also reported to be the fastest growing sport out there.

Technologies

It can not be denied that the tables have turned and that snowboarding has since had a huge influence on the way that we ski and the shape of those planks! Because of the shape of a modern day snowboard, the fact that has a large surface area and that it is rounded at both ends, it has brilliant floatation qualities. It is a beast in the powder, with your weight just a little on the back foot the nose reaches to the sky and the board floats in even the deepest snow. More importantly it looks effortless and extreme skiers wanted some. Freestyle quickly became a trademark of snowboarding too, these guys could spin and flip and grind metal in style, as if on a skateboard but on snow. This was again down to the make up and structure of the board. Ski brands caught onto this pretty sharpish and started to develop wider planks for stability and floatation off-piste and also raised tips and tails of the same dimensions (twin tips) for freestyle purposes. Very recently snowboarding has brought skiing reverse camber or ‘rocker’ technology.

And so the story continues. Although there will always be competition between the two it is now seen to be perfectly expectable to participate in both sports which most snow loving youngsters do and very well at that. Skiers and snowboarders spend their time on the mountain together; they ride the same slopes, hit the same kickers and rails and choose the same sick lines in the deep stuff.

Tags: Outdoor Pursuits, skiing, Snowboarding