Bastard Child

by Jack Michaud

Somebody once pondered, "isn't hardboot alpine snowboarding really just the inbred bastard child of skiing and snowboarding?"

If that is true, then softboot snowboarding is the inbred bastard child of skiing and skateboarding. In fact, neither is true, and here's why.

It could be reasoned that all snowboarding was started as the child of surfing and sledding, derived from kids standing up on their sleds and standing sideways, surf-style. This was Sherman Poppin’s inspiration for the Snurfer, which was named for the obvious similarity to surfing.

Jake Burton Carpenter learned how to ride a Snurfer and then decided he could improve upon it for a better surfing-on-snow feel. Thus, Burton Snowboards was born, and is the direct descendent of the Snurfer. Tom Sims was on the other side of the country building his own boards and he would soon be pushing the concept of the half-pipe and freestyle snowboarding as a derivative of skateboarding. However before that, his boards had swallow-tails and were built for powder. Dimitri Milovich was in Utah developing the Winterstick, which was a dedicated powder soul surfer.

So, the two sports of surfing on snow and skateboarding on snow were developing in parallel, simultaneously, and both would come to be called snowboarding.

Burton has been quoted long ago as believing that racing was the future of snowboarding, and that freestyle and halfpipe were silly side-show antics. And who could blame him, because freestyle skiing was such a joke at the time. Hence, the Burton "Nationals" and then the US Open concentrated on racing.

One of the mottos of the human species is "if it moves, we will race it." So it is no surprise that once we learned to surf the snow, we would want to race each other. Snowboard racing was just as inevitable as ski racing - it was not taken from ski racing.

The fact that carving a snowboard and carving a ski now look very similar is due to the fact that skiers and snowboarders are both human beings with the same body mechanics. We have both evolved efficient ways to carve a turn, which it turns out, are nearly identical from the knees up.

As history shows, skiers were the first to figure out how to go really fast down the hill. But snowboarders were the first to figure out how to carve a nice round turn at sub-super-g speeds by putting usable sidecut on their boards. The 1989 Burton Safari 165 had roughly a 16 meter radius at a time when skis were over 30 meters. Skiers, who as a group had previously been reluctant to acknowledge the legitimacy of the snowboard, finally saw snowboarders carving good turns and thought it looked like fun - thus the birth of the shaped ski.

So it could be argued quite defensibly that downhill skiing as we know it today is actually the bastard child of skiing and snowboarding. It was race-minded snowboarders who took the activity of slicing clean turns in the snow, gave it a name - "carving" - and brought it to the masses.

Similarly, softboot snowboarders have created a new approach to freestyle. Basically, they took skateboarding and put it on the snow. However, with the feet attached to the board, the door was open to create a body of freestyle technique not previously possible anywhere else.

At some point, after snowboarders became numerous enough and talented enough, skiers could no longer deny that freestyle snowboarding was cool. Now resorts build freestyle parks and pipes, and skiers are all over them, hucking corkscrews, rodeos, dinner rolls, and even launching and landing switch (backwards). Suddenly, freestyle skiing is cool again.

Like new-school downhill skiing is the child of snowboarding and old-style skiing, new-school freestyle/freeride skiing is the child of snowboarding and old-style skiing.

Who made who? Who made you? Hard to say. But today, no snowboarder needs to give skiers much credit for our existence or our technique. In fact, it could be the other way around.