Snowboarding: Shredding the Status Quo

The first World Cup snowboarding competition in the U.S. in 1995 helped launch the sport into the mainstream.

The year 1995 was an awkward one between skiers and snowboarders. Skiers were the establishment. Snowboarders were hip, striving to be recognized as legitimate in snow sports yet purposely antiestablishment. The two mountain-based cultures did not get along.

Most ski resorts allowed snowboarding, welcoming its youthful energy and dollars. But there were big-brand holdouts, cautious about accepting this radical new way to glide down mountains. Snowboarders purposely separated themselves from skiers, with their own brands of gear and apparel, shops, hangout spots and “comps” (competitions). Being a skier posed a dilemma when I was asked to be a television commentator for the first World Cup snowboarding event in the United States, at Mount Bachelor, Oregon.

If you’re wondering why a television network, in this case Prime Sports, would hire a skier for a snowboarding broadcast, it’s because there simply weren’t any snowboarders back then who had commentated for a mainstream sports broadcast. Ski-race commentators were close enough, according to the executive producers of that era—who likely didn’t participate in either sport.

During the 1990s, most boarders, even the top riders in the world, were fairly new to the sport. Some grew up skiing and wanted to try something different. Many crossed over from skateboarding and surfing. A snowboarder who had been riding for 10 years was a veteran. The best riders in the inaugural World Cup season, during the winter of 1994–95, were teenagers.

Thirty years ago, the sports television landscape itself was evolving dramatically. Cable television was growing quickly but gave viewers only 10 percent of the programming available on it today. A premium cable subscription got you a whopping 40 channels if you lived in a city, half that elsewhere. The major networks mainly aired sports round-ups and an event or two on weekends. Or you could tune into ESPN, Prime Sports Network, SportsChannel, or a few others. At major ski resorts, you could watch a morning show on Resorts Sports Network, hosted by Andy Mill and me, about skiing and, occasionally, snowboarding, then watch ski movies. YouTube and streaming sports coverage did not yet exist. The Internet was in its infancy, accessible via dial-up and often accompanied by long-distance phone charges. Only about 12 percent of the U.S. population had cell phones.

World Cup snowboarding, formally called the Grundig FIS World Cup, made its debut as a circuit in January 1995, with several events in Europe before coming to Mount Bachelor in early March. This launch proved to be another source of conflict.

In 1995, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) leaned toward adding snowboarding to the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, but the sport needed a credible international governing body. The IOC selected the established Federation Internationale du Ski (FIS), which had no existing snowboarding structure, over the five-year-old (and countercultural) International Snowboard Federation (ISF), which had already hosted a couple of world championships. As a result, a number of ISF stars boycotted FIS competitions, most notably Norwegian Terje Håkonsen, widely considered the top rider at the time. But some athletes switched to FIS, due to the allure of the Olympics.

Thanks to its potential as a new Olympic sport in three years, Prime Sports Network, a competitor of ESPN that later morphed into Fox Sports, was eager to cover the first snowboarding World Cup in the United States on its Prime Olympic Showcase. I was excited for the opportunity to co-host the program but was stressed at the assignment as well. My job at Mount Bachelor included interviewing athletes at the bottom of the halfpipe. Would they talk to me? Acutely aware of the rift between skiers and snowboarders, I would be the essence of uncool in the eyes of many of the boarders.

Though my broadcast partner, Tim Singer, would call the action for the spring 1995 competition, I had to be the expert both on-camera and in the booth. I knew nothing about high-level halfpipe competition, and I only had a week to learn. It’s not like I could Google the rules of World Cup snowboarding or the biographies of the athletes. Most of my education would need to happen at Mount Bachelor.

The on-site logistics triggered more heartburn. The event included men’s and women’s slalom, giant slalom and halfpipe, but the focus of the TV coverage was the men’s halfpipe, which was located far enough up the mountain that I would need to take the chairlift to get there. Should I use skis or a snowboard? On skis, I was an agile expert, able to get around a mountain without effort, carry broadcast gear, adeptly shoot point-of-view footage and manage a mic. On a snowboard, I was a beginner. I could probably get to the halfpipe in one piece, if conditions were perfect.

I decided to use ski gear, prioritizing getting the job done over trying to fit in. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the halfpipe to find a mix of skiers and snowboarders! The athletes were on snowboards, of course, but most of the coaches and officials were on skis, just to get around competently.

When the first round of qualifying got underway, I planted myself under the PA emcees, pad and pencil in hand, then scribbled pages of notes on the athletes, their tricks, the scoring system and anything else I could glean about halfpipe competition. By the first run of the finals, I felt more grounded in the halfpipe world.

Back then, there was one judge for each of the categories: standard maneuvers, rotations, amplitude, landings and technical merit. An athlete’s scores for both runs in the finals were combined for the overall result. Today’s judging categories are more comprehensive, accounting for a rider’s skill and style through progression, amplitude, variety, execution and difficulty. A team of six judges scores each run; the highest and lowest scores are thrown out, and the other four scores are averaged. Only the best of an athlete’s three runs in the finals counts.

The halfpipe of the 1990s was much smaller, too. Its walls were 10 to 12 feet high, and the structure was about 100 yards long and some 50 feet across from lip to lip. Today, the halfpipes in international competition, often called superpipes, dwarf their 1990s ancestors: 22 feet high, 65 feet across and up to 600 feet long.

Athletes in the 1990s could not generate as much height in those smaller pipes. As a result, basic spins wowed the crowd during that first World Cup season. The holy grail was landing a 720 (two full rotations), which sounds pedestrian compared to today’s triple cork 1040s (three off-axis flips with three full rotations).

The McTwist—a backside 540 with a single front flip—was the pinnacle of inverted tricks, unless Mike Jacoby was riding. His “Jake Air” (also known as the “J-Tear”), a frontside 540 with a handplant on the lip of the halfpipe, was a crowd pleaser. Placing a hand on the lip of the halfpipe today is unthinkable in elite competition, as it limits a jump’s amplitude, which in turn reduces the opportunity for flips and spins, key to high scores.

At the Bachelor World Cup, Jacoby competed in slalom and giant slalom in the two days leading up to the halfpipe, where he finished sixth. Giant slalom would ultimately be his best event on the World Cup and his ticket to snowboarding’s debut as an Olympic sport in Nagano, where he finished well off the podium. Slalom has since disappeared from international snowboarding.

The stars of the halfpipe at Mount Bachelor were Lael Gregory and the now-legendary Ross Powers. Gregory pulled off a flawless run, starting with a front-side tail grab, then a 720 to a 540, and ended with a handplant on the lip, which now sounds so humble but was heroic at the time. Powers, who celebrated his 15th birthday at Bachelor, stumbled on his 720, handing the win to Gregory.

Gregory went on to earn the first overall World Cup halfpipe title that winter but faded as a dominant competitor shortly after. He did not qualify for the 1998 Winter Olympics and quietly retired in 2000.

Powers made the 1998 Olympic team for halfpipe and earned his first Olympic medal, a bronze, at Nagano. He went on to win gold in the Salt Lake City games four years later. And I went on to cover hundreds of hours of skiing and other sports on television but only a few more snowboarding events. However, that pioneering telecast from Mount Bachelor remains one of the most memorable moments of my 20-year broadcast career.

A member of ISHA’s board, Lisa Ballard, formerly Lisa Densmore, was a familiar face on snowsports television during the 1990s and 2000s. Her numerous media awards include three Emmys. Today, she hosts Masters race camps, along with freeskiing trips when she’s not competing on the FIS Masters circuit.