Snowboarding: A Brief History

There’s little room to argue that the first snowboard was the Snurfer, a board originally designed by Sherman Poppen in 1965. Poppen’s Snurfer started to be manufactured as a toy within a year, and was little more than a skateboard without wheels that was steered by a hand-held rope. In the decade that followed, over half a million Snurfers were marketed and sold for children worldwide.

It was during the 1970s and 1980s that snowboarding saw a rise in popularity, thanks to pioneers such as Jake Burton Carpenter (founder of Burton Snowboards) and Tom Sims (founder of Sims Snowboards), who came up with new designs for boards and binding mechanisms that slowly developed into the snowboards that we know today.

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In 1979 the first ever World Snurfing Championship was held at Pando Ski Lodge near Grand Rapids, Michigan. Jake Burton Carpenter came from Vermont to compete with a snowboard of his own design, which was received with protests for Jake entering with a non-snurfer board. However, Paul Graves, the top snurfer at the time, along with several others, advocated that Jake be allowed to race. A modified division was created and won by Jake as the sole entrant. That race was considered the first competition for snowboards and laid the groundwork for what has now become competitive snowboarding.

Snowboarding’s growing popularity is reflected in its recognition as an official sport, when in 1985, the first World Cup was held in Zürs, Austria. The International Snowboard Association (ISA) was founded in 1994 to ensure that universal contest regulations could be provided. Today, high-profile snowboarding events like the Olympic Games, Winter X-Games, US Open, and other events are broadcast worldwide. 97% of resorts allow for snowboarding, the majority of which now have terrain parks. In 2007, twenty percent of all visitors to U.S. ski resorts are snowboarders, and more than 3.5 million people have taken up snowboarding worldwide.