Snowboarding
The thrilling evolution of snowboarding: from its roots to today
From simple initial snowboard prototypes to sleek designs and global recognition, the sport has grown incredibly since its inception.
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“The sports that always stood out to me were the ones that weren’t easily accessed,” said snowboarder Mark McMorris. “I had so much passion for snowboarding that it didn’t matter that I was from the flattest place in Canada. I was going to do it for the rest of my life.”
That quote is about the early 2000s when McMorris was just a kid. While snowboarding was getting pretty big then, it’s nowhere near as popular as it’s become.
7 min
ABC of Snowboarding
Watch part one featuring the history, the tricks and the main protagonists of snowboarding.
What might surprise you is that the history of snowboarding goes back to the 1960s. The sport has grown incredibly, from simple initial snowboard prototypes to sleek designs and global recognition. In 1992, it even evolved to include slopestyle or competitive park riding.
5 min
ABC of Snowboarding: Part 2
Get to know the best riders and tricks, the lingo and the history of snowboarding.
Check out this timeline to see the history of snowboarding through the years.
01
The early years
Snowboarding was created in 1965 when an engineer from Michigan named Sherman Poppen invented the prototype of a snowboard. Of course, like many inventions, others claim they invented the first snowboard – more on this later. Poppen’s initial prototype was a simple design: two skis that were cross-braced together.
Rudimentary though it was, the original concept inspired others, like Dimitrije Milovich, to quickly evolve the initial snowboard’s design. In 1972, Milovich, who was a student at Cornell at the time and known for sliding down snowy hillsides on cafeteria trays, invented the winterstick. His original model, which was “a device made to surf the snow”, looks very similar to the modern longboard.
Halfpipe snowboarding in action
© Daniel Milchev/Red Bull Content Pool
Milovich dropped out of college to move to Utah and spent many years refining his products and designing new ones. His company still exists today.
02
Snowboarding throughout the '80s and '90s
The 1980s and 1990s are an important part of snowboarding history. Professional snowboarding events, which at the time mainly consisted of race and trick events, began in the early '80s, leading to the formation of the International Snowboarding Federation (ISF) in 1985.
Snowboards also started appearing in movies. The snowboarding scene in the James Bond movie A View to Kill, released in 1995, is a good example.
In 1998, snowboarding made its debut at the Winter Games with giant slalom and halfpipe events. In the '90s, manufacturers began producing snowboards at a grander scale, which helped grow the sport immensely.
Three companies, in particular, were a big part of the early manufacturing revolution.
Burton
Originally from New York City, Jake Burton moved to Vermont and started his company, Burton Boards, at the end of the '70s. After he perfected his design and his boards gained popularity, he released a catalogue to sell his product in the early 1990s. It was a novel idea then, at least for the snowboarding industry. This move made Burton Boards one of the biggest names in the sport.
SIMS
SIMS snowboards were founded in 1976 by entrepreneur Tom Sims, who, like Burton, went on to mass produce his product. As a kid, Sims was an avid skateboarder and skier. One day in middle school woodshop class, he invented his prototype for the snowboard. (Unsurprisingly, he is one of the people who also claims to have created the first snowboard.)
Sims was also a very talented athlete in his own right. He actually won the World Snowboarding Championships in 1983. Sadly, Sims died in 2012.
GNU
Mike Olson and Pete Saari founded GNU Snowboards in 1977. In the 1980s, the company made history when it started making snowboards specifically designed for women, which was a huge success. Jamie Anderson, the most decorated female snowboarder, rode with a GNU board. Their designs received tons of notoriety, especially when women outperformed men using GNU boards during competitions. They are all handbuilt in the USA.
The Throwback: Gnu Finsanity / Arbor Zygote Twin
© Jason Horton
03
Early 2000s to the present
Today, snowboarding is wildly popular. Every year, tens of millions of snowboarders and skiers hit the slopes. The sport has even developed its own culture with defined ski and snowboarding terms, and more money than ever is being spent on snowboarding programs at the world stage level. That means athletes have more resources than ever before and can devote their full time to training for the sport.
Disciplines within competitive snowboarding have evolved from the early days of halfpipe, and there are now big air, snowboard cross, parallel giant slalom and slopestyle contests. All these disciplines are events for both men and women at the Winter Games. Outside competition, freeriding is extremely popular and can take the form of boarding in mountainous backcountry, where the thrill is to explore unridden parts and dangerous parts of a mountain. There's also street snowboarding, where pros will attempt to board in urban environments.
You can't take your eyes off a snowboard cross race
© Jan Kasl/Red Bull Content Pool
You'll see massive airs at a Snowboard slopestyle contest
© Peter Morning/Red Bull Content Pool
Outside the Games, the next biggest competition for pro snowboarders is the Winter X Games (held annually). Other events, like the freestyle event Red Bull Infinite Lines and the Natural Selection Tour show how the sport continues to expand and push the progression of athletes who compete in the space.
The ethos behind the Natural Selection Tour was to create a contest that would celebrate natural terrain and creative expression, paired with slopestyle-inspired tricks, and take snowboarding back to its purest form, to seek backcountry exploration.
In Natural Selection, Travis Rice has created a unique contest format
© Tim Zimmerman/Natural Selection Tour/Red Bull Content Pool
Snowboarding may have come from humble beginnings, where two skis were attached together, but the sport has evolved drastically and is more accessible than ever. There are hundreds of resorts across the world where you can go to take part. The growth of snowboarding has also been fuelled by the hundreds of hours of snowboarding videos that have been produced since the 1990s.
04
The evolution of snowboard videos
Having produced 16 films since 2003, the team at Pirate Movie Productions – including producer and sometime-cameraman Basti Balser – have been influential in the evolution of the genre over the last two decades and are uniquely placed to speak on the industry changes in that time.
“My friends and I grew up shooting on Super 8 film in the 1990s, influenced by family holiday films and Volcom skate videos,” Balser explains. “I’m sure a lot of smaller productions used the mini DVD or Video 8 format back then, but Super 8 has so much character, along with 16mm and black and white film.”
2023 has been a great year for innovative action sports films, including Under Black Flag, a snowboarding showcase co-produced by Red Bull and Pirate Movie Productions. It's arguably the year's most stunning snowboarding film, utilising everything from Super 8 to 16mm to crisp digital footage and taking in locations from Alaska to Sweden and Japan.
47 min
Under Black Flag
Top Pirate Crew snowboard shots explode into an epic, timeless thrill – Gigi Rüf, Elias Elhardt and more.
Under Black Flag’s success lies in its mix of old and new technologies, including the RED One camera, beloved by director Christopher Nolan. The resulting film positions grainy, film-shot scenes alongside more traditional helicopter and drone-shot footage of legendary riders like Gigi Rüf and Kalle Ohlson to create something that feels lived-in yet fresh.
There was another evolution: whereas '90s snowboard videos relied heavily on hand-held cameras, Balser deployed two-man drones and helicopters.
“In theory, using drones should speed things up and make filming more spontaneous, but there are a lot of rules about where you can use them,” he says. “You physically have to upload permission to take off in some places. But the advantage is you can get aerial angles in places where you can’t fly or land in a helicopter. For example, in Austria, you’re not allowed to fly low with a helicopter, but we could with a drone. But, open-door helicopters are faster than a drone and able to fly higher.” Getting the balance right is the key to success.
All the angles are covered at a Pirate Movie Productions shoot
© Pirate Movie Productions
As well as filming techniques, Balser also had to reckon with audience attention spans in the age of social media. “A lot of sponsors want their athletes to produce Instagram or TikTok content on their phones, which means they don’t have to invest in the time and cost of making a feature-length film,” he says.
“A couple of years ago, a film like Under Black Flag would have been impossible to produce on this budget, but new technology changed that; now you can chase that of National Geo-graphic-style perfect landscape shot.”
With the level of artistry on display from riders and filmmakers, Under Black Flag is surely the perfect argument for more auteur-led action sports films.
Watch more snowboarding films
05
Snowboarding legends through the ages
Snowboarding has a rich history of legendary figures from backcountry to slopestyle and beyond. Here are a few names you need to know.
Travis Rice
The American is a big-mountain freeride legend with an unrivalled track record for making genre-defining, trailblazing snowboarding films, including The Art of Flight and First Descent.
1 h 17 min
The Art of Flight
Travis Rice and Curt Morgan's follow-up to That's It, That's All raises the bar of snowboarding – again.
Katie Ormerod
Hailing from West Yorkshire, the British boarder won the overall Snowboard Slopestyle World Cup in 2020, becoming the first British woman to win a Crystal Globe. Then, in 2022, she made her Winter Games debut for Great Britain in the women's slopestyle and big-air snowboarding events.
Mark McMorris
The Canadian specialises in slopestyle and big air events. He’s already bagged bronze medals in three consecutive Winter Games and became the first person to land a Backside Triple Cork 1440 in 2011. Find out more about his story by watching Unbroken below
45 min
Unbroken
See Mark McMorris at his most vulnerable and resilient as he battles to get back on his board.
Maddie Mastro
Maddie Mastro is charging hard at the forefront of a new generation of snowboarders. Specialising in halfpipe, she took bronze at the 2018 X Games at the age of 18 before placing 12th for the US team in that year’s Winter Games. With a silver medal in the 2023 X Games in Aspen, she’s one to watch.
Anna Gasser
The Austrian is on a mission to add to her medal haul, including big air gold from the Winter Games in Beijing. She may have been late to snowboarding, but she's more than making up for it now. Get a glimpse into the life of this international star in The Spark Within below.
1 h 1 min
Anna Gasser – The Spark Within
Follow snowboard superstar Anna Gasser over a decade to see how she changed the snowboarding landscape.
Kalle Ohlson
Now retired, Swede Kalle Ohlson recently swapped the backcountry for dad life. Under Black Flag marks his last outing as a pro boarder, collating seven years' worth of awesome video parts into a beautiful swan song.
Jeremy Jones
Nominated by National Geographic as Adventurer of the Year in 2012, the American freerider is known for transitioning from racing to helping to pioneer big mountain riding. As the founder of Protect Our Winters, he also works to mitigate the effects of climate change on the world’s coldest places.
Val Guseli
Australian Val Guseli set some new records in 2023, becoming the first rider in FIS Snowboard World Cup history to finish on the overall podium in slopestyle, halfpipe and big air in the same season. Get to know the teen sensation better in the video below.
6 min
Val Guseli – snowboarding's worst-kept secret
Teenage halfpipe sensation Val Guseli made a huge impact at Laax 2021 – watch out for him at Laax in 2022.
Christian 'Gigi' Rüf
Austria’s own Christian 'Gigi' Rüf, specialises in stand-out film moments, including for Pirate Movie Productions. He's been called “one of the most stylish, versatile and creative snowboarders of all time".
Hailey Langland
Sponsored since the age of six, Hailey Langland really has snowboarding in her blood. She won her first World Cup Grand Prix at 14 and took home an X Games Big Air gold medal with a massive Cab Double Cork 1080 two years later, becoming the first woman ever to land the trick in an X Games competition. She made her first Games appearance at age 17, representing the United States in big air and slopestyle in PyeongChang.
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