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The Boston Globe just published an article exploring what has happened to snowboarding and why snowboard sales and use are declining so rapidly. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Snowboarding Appears to be in Serious Decline
by Tony Chamberlain/The Boston Globe
Whether it’s technology, culture, demographics, or some combination, the trend is clear that snowboarding, once in skyrocketing ascent, has leveled and even declined in many markets.
“Our ski sales have just hammered our snowboards,” said Mike Murphy, Sanchez’s boss at Sportworks in Duxbury, which he manages. “For every 25 pair of skis we sell, there’s maybe one snowboard. It used to be 50-50.”
Earlier this year, in a report published in the National Ski Association Journal, RRC Associates director of operations Nate Fristoe warned that the growth of snowboarding was reversing itself.
“Today, there is every indication that the growth of snowboarding we took for granted has stalled,” wrote Fristoe, whose office is based in Boulder, Colo. “Visitation from snowboarding is headed toward a path of substantial decline.”
No one, it seems, is clear on the entire picture, but the numbers add up from every region of the US snow-sports market.
In its first decade of popularity, beginning in 1991, snowboarding grew from a 7.7 percent share of the skier market to 32.6 percent in 2000. Since that was a decade when skiing’s growth was at a standstill (or in slight decline), snowboarding has been referred to as having saved the industry.
The snowboard scene bloomed as a kind of counterculture to mainstream skiing, featuring the familiar baggy clothing and any number of bad-boy touches borrowed from the hip-hop world.
And even while some boarders reveled in being the rebellious alternative to mainstream skiing, boarding itself was slowly being co-opted by that mainstream. At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, when boarding competition was introduced as a sport, one of the finest riders in the world, Terje Haakonsen of Norway, boycotted the Games because snowboarding had capitulated to the control of the International Ski Federation.
At that time, boarding was in the midst of its greatest ascent, but a few years later, according to Fristoe’s presentation to the National Ski Areas Association, “Snowboarding lost some of its mojo around 2005 and 2006, and we’ve been running on fumes since then. It’s like any kind of trend — full of all sorts of energy until it isn’t.”
Whether the answer lies in better ski technology to fit the off-piste trend, or simply a maturing process, there’s no question that boarders are older. In the same Fristoe study, the “young grommets” who were teens when they started boarding in the 1996-97 season, are now 30 — an age the youth culture views uneasily. According to Fristoe, “Nearly 38 percent of snowboarders are either part of a couple or have children, up from 23 percent a decade before.”
***
At the Mountain High Ski Area in southern California, president Karl Kapuscinski noted last November that in exactly a decade, beginning in 2002, the number of boarders had fallen nearly in half, from 80,000 to 42,000.
Read the full Boston Globe article here:
Slave to the fall line, a minimum of body movement, knees frozen in one position all day, needing a least a foot of pow before you can call it a powder day, not able to make use of most terrain variation. Yup, I remember.
I suspect that Darwinism is the reason….just kidding!
‘Better way’. ‘Big wide open turns’. Sounds like boarder speak for ‘can’t keep it in the fall line’. Glad to hear the use of the trenching tools is on the decline.
Maybe their knuckles have finally ground off after all these years..
Big, wide open turns on wide boards with shallow penetration “maximize your interaction with the snow”!? Whachu talkin bout, Willis?
If you want to maximize your interaction with the snow, go with a ski under 100mm, slow down, unclamp your heels, drop a knee, and breath in the blower.
I’m 40, married, two kids under 6, and have been snowboarding for 26 years. I will never give it up. I believe that the decline started once the ski industry started making skiies like snowboards. Shorter length and more sidecut have made all you figure 8’ers start skiing with wide open turns. I constantly heard from skiiers that powder was being wrecked due to wide snowboard turns. Now I don’t hear it at all because skiiers now ride the better way, the funner way, the proper way, big wide open turns that maximize your interaction with the snow. You’re welcome.
More trees for me!