It’s Not Just Your Kid’s Sport Anymore

If snowboarding gets any more rebellious, it’s going to have to be outlawed.

The sport is a punk-rocking, pot-smoking, board-apalooza of bad-boy rebellion. In short, it’s a youth quake. At least that’s what the mainstream media feed us: Snowboarders are supposed to be the antithesis of Old Guard skiers, who prefer designer outerwear, French-made skis and a glass of chablis next to the fire after an afternoon of hopping down the slopes.

But something funny happened on the way to that stereotype.

Baby boomers began driving to the slopes with snowboards on-board. And many who have surfed the snow have never gone back to their dueling skis, according to statistics. Some experts, in fact, are looking at these mature, cross-over skiers as one of the hottest segments of growth in the snow sports industry.

According to the Leisure Trends Group of Boulder, Colo., 40% of adult snowboarders are 35 or older. And that percentage is growing. The average age of an adult snowboarder is 27 and climbing. And the average age of those adults who ski and snowboard is 34.

“There’s a lot of snowboarders with children and mortgages, the average age of the snowboarder keeps moving up, and the distinction and battle between snowboarding and skiing is diminishing,” says Jeff Harbaugh, a 47-year-old snowboarder who is a business consultant and analyst for the snow, surf and skateboard industries.

The phenomenon unfolds daily in the San Gabriel Mountains during this unusually healthy snow season, where boomers mix peacefully with teenagers and twentysomethings in a celebration of the 8-foot snow pack.

Richard Doherty, a 37-year-old from Venice, switched from skis to snowboards three years ago and never looked back because, he says, snowboarding is easier on his body.

“Whenever I fell on my skis, I felt a twinge in my knees that lasted the rest of the day,” he says during a break between runs at the Mountain High Resort near Wrightwood.

Likewise for Steve Birket, a 34-year-old from Orlando, Fla., who also crossed over for good. “With skiing, there’s too many things to think about--two skis, two poles,” he says. “Snowboarding is just you and the board.”

Indeed, many baby boomers who compare snowboarding with skiing agree that the knees and the coordinating of two skis are problems. They also say the board sport is easier to learn and gives them a second wind on the slopes if they’ve grown bored with skiing. Some boomers are even being lured toward boards because their children are learning the sport.

Eric Nathan, a 42-year-old auctioneer from Manchester, Vt., began snowboarding five years ago at the behest of his teenager. “I took inspiration from my oldest son . . . and I haven’t had a pair of downhill skis since.”

Many boomers are finding that snowboarding revives a sense of fun-loving freedom.

“Skiing became a real stuffy sport--it started being perceived as a rich person’s pastime,” Nathan says. “It’s true that snowboarding had this radical, rebellious image, but once you do it, it’s really not about image. It’s an exhilarating experience.”

Snowboarding is experiencing 30% annual growth that is represented in every facet, from women to teenagers to dads, industry figures show.

“Is snowboarding growing up?” asks John Stouffer, editor of TransWorld Snowboarding Business, the industry trade magazine owned by Times-Mirror Co., the parent corporation of the Los Angeles Times. “No, it’s growing out. The hard-core kids are still going to be hard-core kids. There’s more kids than ever. But skiers who are bored with their sport are saying, ‘Don’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.’ ”

There is evidence that snowboarding is taking up the slope slack of skiing’s slow growth. With as many as 10 million people on the nation’s slopes each season, Joy Spring of Leisure Trends estimates that as many as 3 million of those are on snowboards, while experts in the snow-sports industry say snowboarders will be in the majority by 2005.

This boomlet in snowboarding boomers has encouraged ski companies to continue entering what was once considered a hostile market.

“Certainly the stereotypical snowboarding culture grew out of Southern California more than anywhere else, because it came of surfers and skaters,” says Stouffer. “But when you look at it, it’s really an Alpine culture. We’re not that different from skiers.

“This whole cultural identity was manufactured by mass media more than anything else.”

Longtime ski maker Solomon entered the crowded field of snowboard makers this season with a clean line of “free-ride” models (not like the flexible freestyle models preferred by teenagers who aim to catch air) that have been well-accepted. Ski maker Elan, which entered the market several years ago under the name Nale to avoid the carpetbagging stigma associated with being a ski company, is now proudly producing boards under its original name. And ski maker K2 has emerged from its late-’80s entrance into the scene as the No. 2 snowboard maker in the country.

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Snowboard technology has made the sport much more inviting to boomer skiers and beginners alike. For one thing, snowboarding is usually done with soft, hiking-style boots that are a godsend to skiers sick of stiff, stifling “hard boots.”

Second, the “side-cut” design developed in recent years (an hourglass board template) allows riders to carve turns with less effort.

Finally, there are “step-in” bindings. For most of snowboarding history, riders have had to strap into cumbersome bindings to become one with their boards. This involves skating off the lift, then sitting in the snow and adjusting two straps for each foot.

“The new step-in bindings are a huge influence in getting boomers on boards,” says Stacy Gardner, spokeswoman for the National Ski Areas Assn. “It used to be that you had to sit on your butt and strap in. Now you can click in and go.”

Also, blame the professionalization of snowboard lessons for the influx of elders. Kevin Delaney, 32, and his brother, Brian, 29, both champion snowboarders, saw the baby boom coming their way and officially launched an adult snowboard camp in 1993. The Delaney Snowboarding Camps are now offered in Aspen and Vail, Colo.; Mt. Hood, Ore.; and Japan. Kevin Delaney says his students’ average age is 39 (he surveyed all 5,000 of the camp’s graduates), and 75% of them are skiers.

The Delaney camp promises to have beginners on the intermediate slopes in two days. Part of the training involves using a stick, not unlike a ski pole, that prevents riders from falling too much.

“The adults are used to standing up on their skis, and they haven’t taken a childlike fall in a long time,” Kevin Delaney says. “But when you learn the proper techniques early on, you learn fast.”

At the advanced end of snowboarding lies a genre known as carving--a cross between free-riding, which is simply cruising, and slalom, which is a racing style. It’s often compared to surfing. It is actually dominated by the older guys (legendary big wave surfer Gerry Lopez, 49, is a convert to carving) and is as extreme as it gets. The sport involves long, stiff, slalom-like boards and, often, hard boots. And for some crossovers, it feels similar to downhill skiing.

In typical boomer fashion, Cordon Baesel, a 36-year-old La Jolla surfer with a successful career as an attorney, gave up his day job to start a snowboard company, Pure Carve, with a pair of crossover surfing buddies. After a profitless first year in the saturated snowboard market, he went back to lawyering, but he still has a foot in Pure Carve, for purely pleasurable reasons. The 2-year-old company is putting out a highly technical carving model that requires hard boots.

“Kids are into freestyle snowboarding, which is skateboarding-inspired moves,” Baesel says. “The appeal of carving is to an older person. But the adults get as stoked as the kids--they’re just big kids.”

Baesel and company are betting that fellow boomers will come around to their style of mountain surfing.

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Another boomer who bet on snowboarding--two decades ago--is Jake Burton, owner and president of Burton Snowboards, which now commands nearly half the U.S. snowboard market. In fact, as they did with much of modern youth culture (hip-hop, punk rock), boomers were instrumental in the development of snowboarding. Burton was inspired by Sherman Poppen, who invented the first snowboard (called a “Snurfer”) in the mid-’60s; Demetrije Milovic, founder of Winterstick Snowboards; Chris Sanders, founder of Avalanche Snowboards; and Tom Sims, founder of Sims Snowboards--all in the ‘70s.

After starting his own company in 1977--Burton quit a lucrative job as a corporate trader on Park Avenue--he proceeded to put snowboarding on the map. First, he added metal edges to the boards, allowing them to cut through the snow better. Then, he began convincing ski resorts to allow snowboarding. They did, and the rest is history.

“Skiing went awry and got caught up in status,” Burton says. “Early on, I was laughed at by friends--good friends. Now they all snowboard.”

But as far as Burton Snowboards goes, “We’re not marketing to boomers,” Burton says. “This is a youth-inspired company. We’re not going to make the mistake that skiing did and become elitist.

“Once the fashion magazines print pictures of married couples snowboarding together down the slopes, holding hands and smiles on their faces, that’s the beginning of the end.”