Snurfers sold a million before modern snowboards existed
Snowboarding means riding a single board downhill with both feet bound on. Sherm Poppen’s 1965 Michigan “snurfer” toy sparked the boom; Olympic medals arrived at Nagano in 1998, and para-snowboarding later joined the Paralympic programme. Recreational and contest scenes now share freeride, freestyle, and alpine carve styles.
Poppen strapped two skis together with a tether rope for his daughters; Brunswick licensed the snurfer and sold about a million in a decade, half a million in 1966 alone. Tom Sims built a shop-class board in New Jersey, then commercial Skiboards. Jake Burton Carpenter showed homemade bindings at a 1977 Michigan snurf meet and founded Burton in Londonderry, Vermont, on flexible wood with water-ski foot traps priced at thirty-eight dollars when many hills still banned the craft.
Acceptance lagged: in 1985 barely seven in a hundred American ski areas welcomed boards. By around 1990 most big resorts had separate freeride slopes; today roughly ninety-seven percent of North American and European areas permit snowboarding, and over half offer jumps, rails, or halfpipes. Early competitions include the 1979 National Snurfing Championship open division Burton won alone, the 1983 Soda Springs halfpipe worlds, and the 1985 Zürs World Cup. Karine Ruby and Ross Rebagliati took the first Olympic golds in 1998.
Styles now split freeride, freestyle (including skate-like jibbing on rails), and alpine freecarve with hard boots and narrow stiff boards. Participation topped five million in 2008—about a quarter women—and North America logged 8.2 million riders in 2009–10, over thirty percent of snow-sports traffic. From backyard snurf to Olympic halfpipe, the snowboard kept one durable idea: both feet, one plank, and gravity.
Source: Snowboarding
