Discussions about the origin of snowboarding have been the subject of numerous articles in the history of board sports. The most common versions attribute this creation to two men: Sherman Poppen and Jack Burton. The latter is indeed mentioned in the first patent filings. Having guided Jack Burton off-piste for a few days in Val d’Isère in the 90s, I would say he was a charming and visionary man. There is no question that Burton, Poppen and Tom Sims promoted the sport to the world in the late 1970s.
However, men long before them were already sliding on wooden planks strangely resembling the first snowboards in the United States; men who had practiced for centuries a glide “across the journey” as Sherman Popen liked to say. Indeed, history teaches us that among the Mongols, in the 18th century, the beginnings of snowboarding already existed.
It was in 2008, I was working for Turkey Heliski on a Falquet brothers’s snowboarding movie, “Legends”, that the team realized the origins, or rather should I say, one of the origins of snowboarding. At that time, the two best riders on the planet, Jeremy Jones in Freeride and Stefan Gimpel in Freestyle were the protagonists of the movie. We had to find a story to illustrate the idea that each location had its local legend. It was in Petran, a small mountain village located in the Kaçkar massif, in the North East of Turkey, famous for these “Laz-board” riders that we discovered snowboarders of another age.
Led by their leader, Selim, over 70, men skillfully slid down wooden planks, holding a string in one hand and a wooden stick in the other. The natives had been practicing this ancestor of snowboarding for over 400 years, they told us! Selim used to say: “if I don’t ride, I lose my appetite, my body gets sick, I feel bad”. Surprising, astounding for both Jérémy and Stefan, who were discovering another part of the history of their sport. The excitement was at its height when we had an impromptu session with the local riders who did a few turns with the two best snowboarders in the world, decked out in ancestral snowboards. Extraordinary and unforgettable moments of sharing in this meeting of two eras, of two generations of passionate sliders, teaching us the humility and the richness offered by opening up to other cultures.
Photo credits : Jancsi Hadik
Text : Bazu