A bit of Snowboarding History
Thinking about taking out your Snowboard? And after so many years doing Snow, what do you know about your favorite sport?
Also during this time, avid ski surfer Dimitrije Milovich designed a board the size of skis but much wider and that allowed for “surfing” in powder snow, known as the Winterstick. Already in the 70s, Tom Sims and Jake Burton (founder of Burton Snowboards) among others, began to develop and evolve the snowboard concept, testing new designs, using new materials and including rudimentary bindings for the first time.
It was then that snowboarding had its first burst of popularity, increasing the number of companies dedicated to creating boards, boots and bindings. Snowboarding competitions and videos (which peaked with “Apocalypse Snowboard”) also became popular. Snowboarding's development since then has been exponential, and it was even accepted as an Olympic sport for the first time for the Nagano Winter Olympics in 1998.
Snowboarding, although it is undoubtedly already accepted and recognized worldwide, brought with it a small revolution in the way of conceiving the sport, especially since the most practiced and followed disciplines are freestyle and free descent, little standard and difficult to regulate.
That is why the International Snowboard Federation (ISF), which depended on the International Ski Federation (FIS) had many problems to stay alive, since snowboarding took place on a completely different level than what managers were used to of lifelong skiing, with its races and its stopwatches.
After many discussions, in 2003 the ISF was dissolved and the brands themselves and the snowboarders created the World Snowboard Federation (WSF) and the TTR (Ticket To Ride) competition circuit, as a substitute for the ISF and the Championship Snowboard World Championships respectively (although the FIS continues to take charge of both the Olympic Games and a World Championship). In other words, snowboarding began to be directed in almost all its areas by the snowboarders themselves, although there are still many open fronts that the world of snowboarding is demanding, such as the inclusion of Slopestyle as an Olympic discipline along with Half-Pipe and BoarderCross. . The Ticket To Ride is an independent circuit of freestyle snowboarding competitions covered by the FMT and that includes a huge number of independently organized competitions (although with certain common criteria) that are held all over the world and that spans approximately 10 months. year.
The competitions are ranked according to their importance in stars, ranging from 1 star for small local or national competitions to 6 stars for large international competitions. Each competition, depending on the number of stars (which may vary over time), awards some points to the first five classified within the TTR global ranking, with 1000 points being the maximum that can be obtained in a competition (first classified in a competition 6 stars) and 210.60 the minimum (fifth classified in a 1 star competition).
Within the Ticket To Ride there can be 4 competition formats: Slopestyle, Halfpipe, Quarterpipe and Stadium Slopestyle and two participation formats: invitational (the organizers invite the riders they want) and open (everyone can participate). It is also common for some competitions to set a certain number of rounds in which the participants compete but others set a period of time and the riders can carry out their rounds as many times as they want in what is known as Jam-Session, which releases certain pressure to competitors while encouraging originality and improvement.
