‘Big-Air Snowboarding’ to Make Its Big Olympic Debut
That may all be sports trivia, but it’s about to become important trivia,
because soon, in this very winter of 2018 — 80 years after Trumbull’s breakthrough — will occur the Olympic debut of a sport known as “big-air snowboarding,” which is the snurfing equivalent of big-wave surfing.
Hawaii: Accept this small restoration of roots as a gesture of solidarity, an arm around your shoulder
on the curb outside the gas station as we say, “What happened in there was not cool.”
The history of snowboarding, or as it was known then, “snurfing” (i.e., snow-surfing), does
not begin in Michigan in the 1960s with boards made by a guy named Sherman Poppen.
One biggie that is more clearly attributable to human error: collisions — most often between a rider
and a stationary object, like a tree or a finish-line pillar (the Swiss champion Daniel Loetscher died in the latter way).
A guy in Colorado was snowboarding along and hit an ice patch, which accelerated him to some ungodly speed,
and he zoomed into a “boundary marker rope,” which wrapped him up and strangled him or snapped his neck.