James Bond – Licence to Snowboard

Snowboarding Celebrities No. 1 - James Bond

In a shameless bit of populist coat-tailing, on the back of the new James Bond movie, The Quantum of Solace, we’ve got our very own insight into James Bond.

A lot of people know that Michael J Fox invented skateboarding and popularised the sport through the Back To The Future trilogy. What a lot of people don’t know is that James Bond, although not the actual inventor of snowboarding, had a massive effect on the establishment of the sport through the power of movievision.

James Bond is of course the spiritual father of all extreme sports. In his seemingly endless autobiographical movie series he has conquered a plethora of extremities including parkour, car ice skating, armed Russian baiting, cello case sledding, punnery, shark tickling and lady wrestling. These sports have taken-off to varying degrees of success. Generally the guy seems to really excel in sports that require a huge amount of capital investment and in the current economic climate it’s perhaps no wonder that some of them have never really caught on (we all remember the short lived craze of space shuttle hijacking). His impact on the world of extreme sports, however, often goes without the recognition it deserves, which we can only imagine is because of the huge array of sports that he has spread his genius across.

James Bond - Putting the Double O into COOL

Perhaps in time Mr Bond will get the recognition he so deserves and we will do our part by looking in more detail at his impact on the world of snowboarding:

His snowboarding has only been briefly captured on film once, back in 1985, and the movie was called A View To A Kill which has since been voted the 4th worst James Bond movie of all time. This movie is a bit of an obscure movie in snowboarding circles and that is probably because they didn’t include the obligatory wipe-out scenes and the music was a bit shit.

I’ve attached a video below but in preparation this is a synopsis of what you will see:

After opportunistically thieving some jewellery off a dead person Bond is attacked by what I can only think must be the grieving relatives of the deceased.
Bond takes off on his more familiar skis and pulls off some pretty full-on tricks trying to evade the shooty end of the relative’s guns.
In is the process of his escape one of his skis is shot off and he is forced to continue on just one ski. Yes, it was at this point that Bond single-handedly invented monoskiing (yet another sport that never really took off).
Then inevitably, realising just how camp he looked riding a mono, he steals himself a new whip in the form of a nice orange skidoo.
Very quickly the grieving family manage to blow up his skidoo and Bond is momentarily on the back foot. It’s at this point that his extreme sports genius strikes, as he grabs the skidoo runner, uses it as a snowboard and lays fresh tracks down mountain of snowboarding history.

Now, like I said, this is the only time that James Bond has been captured on video snowboarding. I can only assume that he has had a lot of practice because he turns out to be pretty damn good, especially seeing as he clearly doesn’t have any bindings or even some flash headphones.

So he’s off with a nice little shifty off a wind lip to bonk the faces of two unsuspecting family members.
He’s quickly into some ropey off piste which leads to big cliff drop to ass-plant combination.
He jibs a ridge line and then he rides across a mountain lake. Yup, he invented that too.
By this point I was fully expecting him to invent heliboarding too, but apparently he was all done inventing extreme sports, so he just decide to peg it and then blow up the helicopter with a flare.

Thus ended the legendary snowboarding scene.
Here it is in all it's glory...

Following this scene Duran Duran start piping up with a little ditty they play while Bond indiscriminately massacres a few naked skiers with a laser gun and from that point on the movie, ironically, goes downhill.

And here is Duran Duran banging one out...