February 4, 2022 – Theme Week Day 5

This is the final day of our theme week on Winter Olympic Sports! We’re finishing up with one of the newer Winter Olympic sports – snowboarding! Modern snowboarding began in 1965 when an inventive dad from Michigan named Sherman Poppen, came up with a new toy for his daughters. He fastened 2 skis together and attached a rope to the end so he could pull them downhill. His wife Nancy called his creation the “snurfer”, a combination of snow and surfing. The new toy was a huge hit with his daughters and their friends, so he licensed it to a manufacturer, and sold around a million snurfers over the next decade. Around the same time, an avid snurfer from Vermont named Jake Burton Carpenter, added bindings to his snurfer to secure his feet to the board. He founded Burton Snowboards in 1977, creating snowboards that were made of flexible wooden planks and had foot traps from water skis. His design for boards with bindings became the dominant features in snowboarding. Ski areas were very hesitant to adopt the new sport of snowboarding. Many ski resorts even banned snowboarders from their slopes – in 1985, only 7% of ski areas in the U.S. allowed snowboarding. The sport is much more accepted today, and nearly all ski areas in North America and Europe allow people to enjoy snowboarding. Snowboarding became an official winter Olympic sport in 1998, and since then, the U.S. has dominated the competition, winning 31 medals. Learn more here.