Pop vulture: Shredding myths - popularity myth of snowboarding

American Demographics, Feb, 1998 by Marc Spiegler

Flip through the pages of most youth-culture magazines this winter, and you'll see snowboarders everywhere. Some adorn fashion spreads, others jump at you in lifestyle ads for products like cigarettes and cola. Snowboarding represents risk-taking, rebellion, and youth. Its dull older brother, skiing, seems to have all but disappeared from the mags. To look at the glossies, you'd think everyone under age 30 in North America has started "ripping" the slopes, wearing alpine versions of hipster club wear.

Surprise--like most ad-world iconography, the snowboarding myth doesn't really hold up to close examination. The sport's not that popular or rebel-infested, and it's hardly GenX.

Despite snowboarding doubling in popularity between 1993 and 1996, the National Sporting Goods Association estimates only 3.7 million Americans snowboarded in 1996, 36 percent of dowhill skiing's adherents. And GenXers are about as likely as average to participate. Among the other sports that beat `boarding are snorkeling, badminton, and bow hunting.

Plus, when you compare skiing and snowboarding based on the expense of the equipment involved, they're not that different. With $50 one-day lift tickets becoming almost routine, and the basics--snowboard, boots, and gear--costing roughly $700--it's unlikely that any impoverished slacker types are jumping onboard. It's a sport that's top-heavy with rich kids, and increasingly, their parents. Last year, the sponsorship of Vail's snowboard park switched from Coca-Cola to Tag Heuer, maker of $1,500 luxury sports watches.

"That's a great indication of how attitudes toward the sport are changing," says Vail spokesman Rob Perlman. "They realize it's a formidable demographic with disposable income. That grunge ideology has matured."

Once, snowboarders tended to be adolescent skateboarders and surfers looking for cold-weather hijinks with makeshift equipment. Advertisers may spin snowboarding as the winter equivalent to rebel sports like skateboarding, but it's bloated with healthy, wealthy, not-so-rebellious people. Like sailing.