Photo: Tyler Roemer
Words: Josh Dirksen
The way I see it, the heart of snowboarding is not dying. The amount of participants might be going down, the large advertising budgets are gone and many people think skiing is making its legendary comeback. But we are still in the same position we have always been in. Snowboarding is a fun, lifelong sport that attracts some really cool personalities. I think snowboarding is exactly where it wants to be.
Photo: Pete Alport
I love the analogy of snowboarding being like a person. Sometime back in the 1970s, our surfing/skateboarding love child was born. In the 2000s, it was compared to a clueless teenager, and now everyone says it’s somewhere in middle age. Many people conclude that its life is already over and it’s all downhill from here. But I disagree.
With popularity comes crowded snowboard parks, wacky styles and tracked powder.
We are all to blame for this so-called decline. For years, we talked about how we wanted to teach the world the joys and uniqueness of snowboarding. We wanted everyone to know just how much fun we were having. For some, it was genuine, for others, it was a business plan and for the rest, they were just following a trend. Everyone from two years old to 100 years old just had to give it a try. We collectively signed up for all the biggest sporting venues, shook hands with the biggest sponsors and sold our souls to the mainstream market. But eventually, the so-called trend was over and the amount of people riding and financial opportunities decreased. Some of us sat frustrated wondering why snowboarding wasn’t where we thought it would be; others went searching for more money and many riders simply quit.
So here we are now. We are no longer the hot chick of the snowsports industry. Did we ever really want to be anyway? With popularity comes crowded snowboard parks, wacky styles and tracked powder. The best days are still ahead of us.
Photo: Tyler Roemer
This doesn’t make the best business plan, and we still need the world’s participation in the fight to save our winters from pollution and climate change. But if you are truly a snowboarder at heart, it shouldn’t matter what the world says about our beautiful sport, and it shouldn’t affect how we live and what we do.
As a wise old sticker on Kevin Jones’ board once said: “It was better when you hated us.” Instead of listening to the industry tell us that our glory days are over, let’s sit back and watch as the trend followers leave us behind so we can get back to riding and exploring with our buddies. They can have the money, the fame and publicity. We will take the hardcore riders, legit snowboard companies and untracked powder fields. But once we get control of the steering wheel again, the remaining few of us should agree that we are not going to give it up quite so fast next time.
Read also: Pete Saari: The Way I See It
Originally featured in Snowboard Magazine 12.3: The Immersion Issue
