Snowboarding Uniforms: From a Cultural Divide to a Uniting Force

This year marked Shawn White’s fifth Olympic Games and the seventh for the sport of snowboarding as a whole. That sentence means something to anyone, no matter their background. How did a sport not in the Olympics as recently as 28 years ago come to such prominence? As discussed by New Zealand sociologist Holly Thorpe, snowboarding “initially developed in opposition to skiing.” Even as snowboarding has become more widespread, snowboarders have maintained their unique style. In wishing to divide themselves from skiers, snowboarders have had much more freedom to develop the clothing and styles associated with the sport. In line with this, Thorpe discusses how the clothing in the sport went from ugly purple and teal to a more rebellious “Big Jean Fantasy” style as wealthier individuals entered the sport. This style, which we associate with early snowboarders, does not apply to the whole sport though, but to a group of snowboarders whom John Fry, inventor of the Nastar ski racing system, calls “So-Cal Skaters.” Snowboarders in the West disparaged those in the East, seeing their way of snowboarding as being “for dorks.” Naturally, anger from skiers and media attention gravitated towards these “So-Cal Skaters,” so this was the public image garnered by the sport as a whole. Holly Thorpe described this image, which was well established by the mid to late 1990’s: “Male snowboarders appropriated the fearless, aggressive and heterosexual representation of the urban gangster.” So how did this very individualistic and unorganized style translate into a competition defined by the teams that compete in it?

Hannah Teter of the USA reacts finishing her first run in the women’s snowboard halfpipe final at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010.
Photograph Credit: AP Photo/Marcio Sanchez (Reproduced with Permission Under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) License)

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my family for introducing me to snowboarding and sparking my interest in the Olympics as a competition.

Bibliography

Anderson, Tracy. “2010 Olympic Snowboard (Anti) Uniforms.” X Games. Last modified February 5, 2010. Accessed May 2, 2022. http://www.xgames.com/action/snowboarding/article/4722162/2010-olympic-snowboard-anti-uniforms.

Barjolin-Smith, Anne. “Snowboarding Youth Culture and the Winter Olympics: Co-Evolution in an American-Driven Show.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 37, no. 13 (October 26, 2020): 1322–1347. 

Blanchette, John. “Ross Powers Led U.S. Snowboarders at Landmark 2002 Winter Games.” Team USA. Last modified April 9, 2015. Accessed May 2, 2022. https://www.teamusa.org/News/2015/April/09/Ross-Powers-Led-US-Snowboarders-At-Landmark-2002-Winter-Games.

Brower, Ryan. “A Brief History of the US Olympic Snowboard Team Uniforms.” Men’s Journal. Accessed May 2, 2022. https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/a-brief-history-of-the-us-olympic-snowboard-team-uniforms/.

Fry, John. The Story of Modern Skiing. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010. 

Galbraith, Jeff. “Nagano 1998: Snowboarding: Rebel Revels.” Time. Time Inc., February 9, 1998. Last modified February 9, 1998. Accessed May 2, 2022. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,987801,00.html. 

Kshetri, Nir, and Diana Rojas-Torres. “The 2018 Winter Olympics: A Showcase of Technological Advancement.” IT Prof.20.2 (2018): 19-25.

Lacharite, J. R., and Tracy Summerville. The Campbell Revolution?: Power, Politics, and Policy in British Columbia. Montreal, Quebec Province: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 

“Official Report 1998W V.3 Page 1.” LA84 Foundation. Last modified 1999. Accessed May 2, 2022. https://digital.la84.org/digital/collection/p17103coll8/id/37541/rec/3. 

Payne, Brian K. and Bruce Lawrence Berg. “Anomie, Deviant Behavior, and the Olympics.” Free Inquiry in Creative Sociology 27 (1999): 100-109.

“Team USA Olympic Uniforms through the Years.” Nydailynews.com. New York Daily News, February 8, 2022. Last modified February 8, 2022. Accessed May 2, 2022. https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/usa-olympic-uniforms-years-gallery-1.1602245.

Thorpe, Holly, and Belinda Wheaton. “How Snowboarding Became a Marquee Event at the Winter Olympics – but Lost Some of Its Cool Factor in the Process.” The Conversation. Last modified February 11, 2022. Accessed May 2, 2022. https://theconversation.com/how-snowboarding-became-a-marquee-event-at-the-winter-olympics-but-lost-some-of-its-cool-factor-in-the-process-175053.

Thorpe, Holly. “Embodied Boarders: Snowboarding, Status and Style.” Waikato Journal of Education 10, no. 1 (October 4, 2016). 

Tomlinson, Alan. The Atlas of Sports Who Plays What, Where, and Why. University of California Press, 2011.

“Volcom Replaces Burton as US Snowboard Team Sponsor, Announces with Vid Featuring Shaquille O’Neal.” Boardsport SOURCE. Last modified November 18, 2019. Accessed May 2, 2022. https://www.boardsportsource.com/2019/11/18/volcom-replaces-burton-as-us-snowboard-team-sponsor-announces-with-vid-featuring-shaquille-oneal/.

Author

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *