Snowboarding

It is not easy accurately dating the birth of snowboarding, which itself is clear is that the first tablets were born in the mountains.

The year was 1965 and American engineer Sherman Poppen invented the Snurfer. A Poppen came up with the idea of ​​snurfer as I watched her daughters playing with a ski, and built what we call the first table.

It was a simple plywood table, dimensions well under the current tables, who had no feet and platforms for carrying a rope at the top of the table helping to maintain balance.

The Brunswick Company decided to market the Snurfer, achieving considerable success in sales in the 60 and 70. The first competition was held Snurfer in the year 1968 in Michigan and was a straight drop. In 1969 the surfer and ski enthusiast Dimitrije Milovich began designing snowboards, also using laminated polyester.

This is how the Winterstick, used for the powder had a length similar to a ski but three times as wide, nor did the Snurfer fasteners.

In the early 70's began to work more deeply into the design of those rudimentary tables, and Tom Sims and Jake Burton began to redesign the tables, each one coming to found his own company. These and many others like Chuck Barfoot, Bob Weber, Chris Sanders (Avalanche Snowboards), Mike Olson (GNU Snowboards), ..., supported by the boom that snowboarding was getting built new tables using materials such as fiberglass and testing with different designs.

Determinant was also the contribution made by Jeff Grell who built the first fixed housing, which led to Jake Burton in a contest held in the year 1978, was the first man to use a table (Burton) with fixings.

Snowboard competitions thrived at high speed and the emergence of new companies favored the evolution of boots, bindings and boards.

By 1980, Terry Kidwell removed the metal plate of a Winterstick to begin developing the freeride. Simultaneously in Europe began to work in the footsteps of the Americans, as well as setting new raised flat hard boot (invented by the Swiss Fernandes) or experiments of dubious success as Swingboo, a table consisting of approximately 1 meter length formed by two skis together and in which the equilibrium curve was achieved by shifting the weight so as to always have two sheets in contact with the snow.

In 1987 we celebrated the first official world championship in Brechenridge (USA) and Saint-Moritz (Switzerland). In the mid 80's and early 90's and all that we have discussed (public arrival, brand proliferation, using new materials and components, latest generation of professional discipline, maturity, ....) occurs when the great boom of the snowboard so that in the 1998 Games in Nagano (Japan), snowboarding takes the Olympic sport.

Despite being a relatively young sport many manufacturers, athletes, designers and pioneers have contributed to its development, not forgetting the influence of sports such as surfing, skateboarding and skiing.

This sport has grown so much since the 1990s, partly due to its spectacular and partly because it's easier than skiing at the time to learn. The differences in slopes are, apart from the table that the snowboard bindings do not release until he decides never the corridor, and the boots are generally softer.

It is strange way to run a competitive snowboarding since the ISF (International Snowboard Federation) was dissolved, after creating the WSF. Neither the previous nor current are the epitome of the snowboard, so the rounds of the World are not really the most valued, but there are many other competitions and best valued by practitioners.

Since the 2002-2003 season has created a new type of competition, created by runners, called TTR (Ticket to Ride), much more open in terms of participation and possibilities (each runner can do as many rounds as you like and are themselves Participants who choose the winner), opens a new field of management and organization of snowboard sharply separated from international partnerships, in which the interest was more on money than promotion and proper functioning of the snowboard.