Snowboarding is a winter sport that evolved from skateboarding, skiing and surfing; combining elements of all three of these high adrenaline sports it's not really that surprising the snowboarding caught on pretty quickly, and has evolved into a major winter sport that is rapidly gaining more and more popularity as time goes by.
Developed in the 1960s, Snowboarding was believed to have originated in the United States, where several inventors explored the idea of surfing on the snow. The sport, however, quickly evolved, and the early, rudimentary snowboards gave way, and boy were the original snowboards bad!
It's highly unlikely that there's anyone who has never seen nor heard of Snowboarding. But if you really have no idea what Snowboarding is, just imagine it as surfing or skateboarding but only on snow, or skiing on one ski... and without the ski poles!
Snowboarding is a relatively new winter sport wherein you ride an epoxy-wood core board (resembling a large skateboard) with your feet strapped on it, and manipulate gravity to go down a ski slope. The principle of snowboarding is to maintain your balance as you surf down a ski slope with both feet securely attached to the snowboard via a high-back snowboard bindings.
In skiing, skiers shift their weight from one ski to the other. In snowboarding, riders shift their weight from heels (heelside) to toes as well as from one end of the board to the other. To stop the boards' motion, they push their heels or toes down hard to dig the edge of the snowboard into the snow. Although most people compare snowboarding to skiing, snowboarding techniques are far closer to skateboarding and surfing than to skiing.
One of the most iconic moments for snowboarding, back in its relatively unknown heyday, came in the 1985 movie 'A View to a Kill', where James Bond ended up on an improvised snowboard after losing a ski in a chase scene in the beginning of the movie, and to be fair it was a great way to give the sport a big boost.
Since those early days it has become a major winter sport, with three main styles of competition exist: Alpine, Freestyle, and Boardercross. Snowboarding has even joined the Winter Olympics, having been part of it since it was introduced in 1998 at Nagano in Japan. Originally in only covered 2 disciplines - Halfpipe and Giant Slalom, but since then it has evolved to now include 3 disciplines - Halfpipe, Parallel Giant Slalom and Boardercross.We at Surface2Air Sports hope this helps your under standing of snowboarding and we will keep adding info here.
Thanks for reading.
The S2AS Team