A heady mixture of competition, collaboration and fun helped create the snowboards we enjoy today, writes Roger Cox
By their nature, most historical documentaries are packed full of archive footage, most of it average, some of it better than average, some of it clearly just filler that means you don’t have to spend quite so long looking at yet another talking head.
Occasionally, though, you’ll see a clip that fits in so perfectly with the story the director is trying to tell that it seems almost too good to be true; a period snippet so on-message that you can imagine the entire creative team high-fiving and doing victory laps of the editing suite after viewing it for the first time.
The pioneering American snowboard brand Burton is celebrating its 50th anniversary this winter, and to mark the occasion it’s releasing a five-part documentary titled 50 Years of Snowboarding, with each chapter telling the story of a different decade in its history. The first ten-minute instalment, Sideways Revolution (1977-1987) is available to view now on the Burton website and on YouTube and – as the title suggests – it sets out to capture the very early days of the sport, when gear was still cobbled together in people’s garages and sheds and sliding sideways on planks of wood was still banned at most ski resorts.
Happily, the archive footage that director Rose Corr has knitted together in a pleasingly homespun style for this first episode is all killer and no filler, from shots of the company’s late founder Jake Burton Carpenter surfing deep powder snow on a no-bindings prototype board, to out-of-control downhill racers dressed in Lycra and motorbike helmets crashing so hard it’s a wonder any of them survived to tell the tale.
The stand-out clip, though, is a brief moment captured at the 1986 US Open Snowboarding Championships at Stratton Mountain Resort in Vermont. A young kid of perhaps 13 or 14 grins cheekily at the camera. “We used to do skiing”, he says, “but now there’s a new thing...” (the dramatic pause is expertly judged) “...and it’s a lot better than the old thing.”
In just 20 words and with one slightly conspiratorial smile, that young grommet somehow encapsulates all the raw, counter-cultural energy of snowboarding’s formative years. If skiing had become an old-money, establishment pastime, then snowboarding offered a younger, punkier alternative, and its future was being written in the present.
As the film shows, snowboard gear design and innovation were taking place at lightning speed throughout the late 70s and early 80s. In just a few years, the “front rope” introduced in the 1960s by snowboard innovator Sherman Poppen was binned, surfboard-like fins, designed for riding through deep powder, were added and then abandoned in favour of steel edges, and simple footstraps were replaced by high-back bindings. In the blink of an eye, what started out as a simple children’s toy had morphed into a serious mountain tool that would eventually be ridden down Mount Everest, and would form the basis of an industry that’s now worth over £3 billion per year.
50 Years of Snowboarding is narrated by Jake Burton Carpenter’s widow, Donna Carpenter, who co-founded the company and is now its owner and chairs the board of directors. She’s clearly being more than a little tongue-in-cheek when she describes the early days of snowboarding as “One of the greatest creative explosions in human history... depending on who you ask” (Hey Donna, the Renaissance called – they’d like a word). Joking apart though, there is something special and also a little mysterious about these unexpected moments in time when sudden, rapid advances in a given area are made possible by lots of creative people coming together in an explosion of ideas that usually occurs in a ratio of one part competition to two parts collaboration to three parts fun.
There isn’t space to get into the nitty-gritty of who “invented” snowboarding here. Given that people in the mountains of Turkiye have been sideways-sliding on snow for hundreds of years using simple wooden planks, they probably have a better claim than any of the American snowboard pioneers of the 20th century.
What the Burton film makes you appreciate, though, is how much we owe to the gear innovators of the past and also how little time we spend thinking about them.
How many climbers look back at the work Hamish MacInnes put into developing his Terrordactyl ice axes and/or offer up a silent prayer to him when their modern equivalents bite reassuringly into a firm piece of ice during a crux move? How many modern surfers raise a post-surf glass to Simon Anderson for deciding to put a third fin on the bottom of his surfboard in 1981, thereby ushering in the modern thruster design that most people have been riding ever since? At a rough guess: not many.
So, when I first get a chance to dust down my snowboard this winter, even though it isn’t a Burton one, I’ll still say a silent thank-you to Jake and the gang – for giving us a new thing, and making it (arguably) better than the old thing.