Discover Snowboarding
n.
Sport of sliding downhill over snow on a snowboard, a wide ski ridden in a surfing position. Derived from surfing and influenced also by skateboarding as well as skiing, snowboarding began to burgeon among young people in the U.S. in the mid-1980s. The first Olympic snowboarding competition was held in the 1998 Winter Games. The two main events are giant slalom (similar to Alpine giant slalom) and halfpipe, in which riders use a large, snow-covered trench (halfpipe) to repeatedly launch themselves into the air and perform various acrobatic feats.
History of Snowboarding
The first modern snowboard was arguably the Snurfer (a portmanteau of snow and surfer), originally designed by Sherman Poppen for his daughter in 1965 in Muskegon, Michigan. Poppen's Snurfer started to be manufactured as a toy the following year. It was essentially a skateboard without wheels, steered by a hand-held rope, and lacked bindings, but had provisions to cause footwear to adhere. During the 1970s and 1980s as snowboarding became more popular, pioneers such as Dimitrije Milovich, Jake Burton Carpenter (founder of Burton Snowboards from Londonderry, Vermont), Tom Sims (founder of Sims Snowboards) and Mike Olson (GNU Snowboards) came up with new designs for boards and mechanisms that had slowly developed into the snowboards and other related equipment that we know today.
Initially, ski areas adopted the sport at a much slower pace than the winter sports public. now, approximately 97% of all ski areas in North America and Europe allow snowboarding, and more than half have jumps, rails and half pipes. On March 18, 2008 Taos Ski area officially welcomed the first snowboarders to their resort, after years of exclusion.
Source: All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Snowboarding Styles
Freeride
The freeride style is the most common and easily accessible style of snowboarding. It involves riding down any terrain available. Freeriding may include aerial tricks and jib tricks borrowed from freestyle, or deep carve turns more common in alpine snowboarding, utilizing whatever natural terrain the rider may encounter.Freeriding equipment is usually a stiff soft shell boot with a directional twin snowboard. Since the freeride style may encounter many different types of snow conditions, from ice to deep powder, freeride snowboards are usually longer and have a stiffer overall flex.
Freestyle
In freestyle, the rider uses manmade terrain features such as rails, boxes, handrails, jumps, half pipes, quarter pipes and many other features. The intent of freestyle is to use these terrain features to perform a number of aerial or jib tricks.
The equipment used in freestyle is usually a soft boot with a twin tipped board, though freeride equipment is often used successfully. The most common binding stance used in freestyle is called "duck foot", in which the trailing foot has a negative degree of arc setup while the leading foot is in the positive range i.e. -9 degree/+12 degree. Freestyle riders who specialize in jibbing often use boards that are shorter than usual, with additional flex and filed down edges. A shorter length enables the board to be rotated faster and requires less energy on the rider's part.
Freestyle also includes halfpipe tricks. A halfpipe (or "pipe") is a trench-like half-tube made of snow. Tricks performed may be rotations such as a 360 degrees (a full turn) in the air, or an off-axis spin like a "McTwist". Tricks can be modified while hitting different features. Some riders enjoy jibbing, which involves grinding a rail, a box, or even a tree trunk, or simply boarding on anything that is not snow.
Freecarve
Similar to skiing, this race and slalom focused style is still practiced, though infrequently. Sometimes called alpine snowboarding, or the 'euro-carve', freecarving takes place on hard packed snow or groomed runs and focuses on the ultimate carving turn, much like traditional skiing. Little or no jumping takes place in this discipline. Freecarve equipment is a ski-like hardshell boot and plate binding system with a true directional snowboard that is usually very stiff and narrow to facilitate fast and responsive turns. Shaped-skis can thank these "freecarve" snowboards for the cutting-edge technology leading to their creation.
Source: All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Search great Merchants like Altrec and ProBoardShop for quality Gear...