Snowboarding is a relatively new winter sport, at least in comparison to skiing that has evolved from the activity done by northern peoples for thousands of years. It, however, grows even more popular and is very likely to become more wide-spread than its natural predecessor, skiing. Nevertheless, it is somewhat less accessible, for in order to truly see and feel what it is to be snowboarding, one has to go to the mountains, while skiing can be done on the flat surface as well.
The first snowboard was created in 1964 by Shervin Popper, who was inspired by seeing his daughter trying to slide down the hill while standing on a sled. He made a crude construction of two pairs of skis, gave it to her daughter, and after a demonstration all the local children wanted to have something of this kind as well. The first snowboard ever was a tremendous success in that neighborhood. In the course of the following decades a number of different people who had nothing to do with each other started to produce similar contrivances, sometimes on a mass scale. Still, it wasn’t until the early eighties, when the snowboard started to make appearances in a number of sports’ magazines and on TV in the USA and Canada. However, the major public still treated snowboarding as somewhat too peculiar to be considered seriously.
Since then, however, it gained popularity steadily and was accepted in many sets of winter sports, becoming an integral part of any winter competition. Nowadays, it is equally liked and…