Snowboard Winter Sport IV

Snowboarding began in 1900 with the invention of the monoglider by the Austrian Toni Lenhardt. He was so successful with it that monoglider competitions were held in Bruck an der Mur from 1914. It is said that in 1929 the US-American Jack Burchett was the first to think about how to make a rideable base from chipboard, horse reins and clotheslines that was suitable for snow. However, his idea was purely private and never reached the market. The intellectual roots of snowboarding lie in surfing.

In 1963, surfer Sherman Poppen and later skateboarding world champion Tom Sims (both from the U.S.) experimented with old doors and large wooden boards on which they mounted tabs to recreate the feeling of surfing on snow. Poppen developed the Snurfer and eighth-grader Tom Sims the "Skiboard" built as a school project in 1963, which is considered one of the original snowboards.

Today, snowboarding is a popular sport that has grown from a small "faith community" to millions of followers. Ski resorts have recognized this trend for some time and invested large sums in adapting their slopes (or at least parts of them) to the needs of snowboarders. So-called "fun parks" can now be found in every major ski resort; they usually contain rails, half pipes, quarter pipes, ramps, corner jumps, straight jumps and the like. As a result, the sport has developed in its professionalism and allowed the competition to grow continuously in all its disciplines.