:43:03
[Announcer On P.A. ]
Anybodyknow his name?
Shaun White coming home with the gold.
:43:09
If he thought he was famous now,
just wait till the Olympics.
:43:27
[ Narrator]
Despite growing acceptance,
snowboarding was still underground.
:43:31
In the mid-'80s, early contests
brought together snowboarders
from all over the world,
:43:36
triggering the sport's
rapid evolution.
:43:41
The U.S. Open was huge for us
on the East Coast.
:43:43
That's where we went to watch
the other guys that were top in the sport
show us what they had.
:43:47
And it was our chance
to show them what we had.
:43:50
I started snowboarding
up in Tahoe.
:43:54
And not until the first time I went to
my first world championships contest
in Breckenridge...
:43:58
did I realize that snowboarding
existed anywhere except Tahoe.
:44:01
There's European snowboarders
and there's the East Coast Burton guys.
:44:06
And there's now
bigger hard-core guys.
:44:08
It was just a bunch of people
stoked to see that there were
other people out there doing it.
:44:13
[ Narrator]
As contests evolved, freestyle
and free-riding became the focus.
:44:17
These creative, more expressive
styles of riding would become
the driving forces...
:44:21
that would
shape snowboarding's future.
:44:23
The whole birth of
freestyle snowboarding came from us
being able to ride half-pipes.
:44:28
Back in the day,
it was dominated by racing.
:44:31
Racing became so serious
andyou didn't like the people
you were racing against,
:44:34
and there was all these rivalries.
:44:38
[ Richards ]
Half-pipe gave it a chance
for kids to just be kids.
:44:43
[ Farmer] The tallest half-pipe
was probably- if it was six feet tall,
that was a pretty damn big half-pipe.
:44:49
And it was really just a mess.
:44:51
It was really just,
you know, kind of a mess.
:44:54
[Man ] Now you go onto these pipes
and they're, like, 20-foot walls,
:44:58
pefrectly cut by a pipe dragon.