In 1965 a chemical engineer by the name of Sherman Poppen tied two skis together as a toy for his daughter. His wife nicknamed the board the “Snurfer” and it was controlled by a rope attached to the nose. A year later Poppen had sold the Snurfer to a manufacturer, who created about half a million units, mostly as a toy for kids. Poppen organized competitions using the Snurfer, and at these competition former competitive skier Jack Burton fell in love with the Snurfer. To him it was a way to experience surfing for those who couldn’t get to the beach.
In 1969 another man invented a snowboard of his own accord. Dmitri Milovich created a snowboard after sliding down hills in college on a cafeteria tray. Armed with this inspiration, he combined skis with the functionality of the surfboard. In 1972 he began a company called Winterstick, and manufactured his product for the mass market. It was the first time a snowboard prototype received large-scale press, as Dmitri had articles in Newsweek, Playboy, and Powder, all hailing his snowboard as the next great invention for winter sports.
1977 was a pivotal year in the history of the snowboard. It was the year that Jack Burton, former Snurfer rider, began manufacturing boards in Vermont, as an homage to his years as a Snurfer competitor. At this point he began to make boards out of laminated hardwood, a great advancement in board technology. The same year Tom Sims, the junior high inventor of the Ski Board, started a company to produce his invention. Tom’s friend and employee Chuck Barfoot is credited with the actual manufacture of the Sims boards, and created the infamous “Flying Yellow Banana,” which was essentially a skateboard deck atop a plastic shell with skegs. It is Barfoot that is heralded as the father of the modern Snowboard, having produced a board that used actual ski technology in 1980.
Two years later, the first official snowboard race was held at Suicide Six in Vermont. The word was out, and by 1985 39 of the 600 ski resorts allowed snowboarders on their slopes. In that same year, a snowboarding magazine, Absolutely Radical, was published, then changed their name to International Snowboarding Magazine soon thereafter. In 1986 the movie “Apocalypse Snow,” birthed an entire generation of European snowboarders, eager to shred it up on the slopes of Europe’s ski resorts.
This point marked the crescendo of the mid-eighties snowboard craze. Along with it came an early "bad boy" image, based largely on the fact that adolescent males (who acted exactly like adolescent males on skis) comprised the majority of snowboarders at the time. A rebel reputation was established and is still prevalent today, despite snowboarding's vast appeal to men and women of all ages.
Some ski resorts banned snowboarding during this early phase but many have since come to accept the wildly popular and still growing winter sport. Throughout the 80's and 90's, competitions and events such as halfpipe and boardercross became popular on an international scale and Snowboarding was in the Olympics for the first time in 1998, in Nagano, Japan. This established snowboarding as an accepted competitive sport, not merely a trend which would disappear with shifting crowds. However, the “bad boy” image of snowboarders persisted and when Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati won the gold medal in the giant slalom he had to submit a urine sample. The sample tested positive for marijuana with 17.8 nanograms per milliliter, despite Rebagliati's claims that he had not smoked marijuana since April 1997. His gold medal was taken away, but eventually returned. The International Olympic Committee, lacking an agreement with the International Ski Federation on marijuana use, could not validly strip Rebagliati of his medal.
The sport of snowboarding continues to carve its own unique path. In the year 2000, snowboarding was the fastest-growing sport in the US (followed by skateboarding) with the number of people who went snowboarding increasing 51.2 percent from the previous year to a total of just over 7.2 million participants. Downhill skiing grew by just six percent, with a total of 14.7 million participants. More than 3.4 million people Snowboard today, this number comprises about 20% of the visitors to US ski resorts. In a short 40-year history, snowboarding has cemented itself into the hearts and minds of enthusiasts around the world. According to freethesnow.com, snowboarders currently make up 25% of all winter sport participants, and that number is sure to continue to rise.