Punters vs Core Snowboarders & What Shaun White Actually Means To Snowboarding

Over the past few months across the snowboard magazines and the blogosphere there's been a heated discussion about what Shaun White brings or doesn't bring to snowboarding. Some people hate him, some are disappointed by him and some have defended him, interestingly few have professed to actually like the fella. There's been lots of well argued opinions, but ultimately it has all been opinions and as they say, opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one. We wondered what's the reality? Does Shaun White represent snowboarding or not?...


Let's hit the stats.

There were 6.1 million snowboarders in the US in 2010. I'm going to use the snowboard participation in 2010 from the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), because it's the most useful source I can get hold of and there hasn't been a dramatic change either side of that year.

Of those 6.1 million snowboarders:

• 34.4% of them were 'frequent' snowboarders, who snowboarded for 10 days or more that year. 
• 43.8% were 'occasional' snowboarders, hitting the slopes between 3 and 9 days.
• 21.7% were 'infrequent' only ridging for 1 or 2 days.

Here's those figures in a pie chart :

(OK I may have lied a little at the end of last week about not doing another pie chart)

66% of snowboarders, the whole area in blue, are only occasional or infrequent snowboarders.

Even the frequent group is not all that dedicated, take that 10 day figure up to two weeks and you'd expect to have another group making up about 20% of the overall figure. It's very likely that only 15% or less of snowboarders are on the hill more than two weeks a year.

There's a lot of people who snowboard, but on the whole they're not exactly dedicated. 

So, how big is the dedicated core of snowboarding?

Reading a snowboard magazine is an activity that's pretty much a staple of anyone who considers themselves to be a serious snowboarder, the type of people who engage in debates about the relative merits of Shaun White. It's not a bad way of counting what most people would consider to be the core snowboarders.

Here's the same chart of the total number of US snowboarders compared with the circulation figures of the biggest US snowboard magazine Transworld Snowboarding:

Hardly any snowboarders actually read a snowboarding magazine. TWS have a circulation of just 120,558 readers, just 2% of all US snowboarders. For comparison Snowboarder Mag have just 70,000 readers and Snowboard Magazine just 60,000 and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a significant overlap between those readerships too. Effectively core snowboarders only account for a minimum of 2% and a maximum of about 5% of all snowboarders.

If you're reading this article, you probably fit in this 5% group and it's likely the snowboarders you know do too. When your're a 5 percenter and your surrounded by others 5 percenters it might seem that snowboarding is all about the core values, but it's not. 95% of snowboarders don't know what the core values of snowboarding are, they don't know the history, they don't know the jargon, they don't know the names of the riders or of the tricks and they are largely ambivalent to all of these things.

95% of snowboarders are punters. Snowboarding is all about the punters.

In short; the core snowboarding values which we are concerned about do not represent snowboarding. They hardly matter at all.


So if the core snowboarders and the things we care about don't represent snowboarding to most snowboarders then what does?

Knowing that the snowboard magazines were only read by a very small proportion of snowboarders the next thing to take a look at is to see if there are aspects of snowboarding that the punters are more interested in.

• Transworld Snowboarding has 120,558 readers, a similar number of Facebook likes (167,000) and they have 454,389 visitors to their website. They reach a few more people that way, but some of these people won't be based in the US which stops the neat comparison to the 6.1 million US snowboarders.
• Travis Rice, core snowboarding's current poster child, has a similar influence to TWS with 175,000 Facebook likes.
• Industry behemoth, the main supplier of snowboarding gear to punters and the guys responsible for making the US Olympic team look like homeless patchwork dolls, Burton, is more representative with 685,000 likes.

But the most representative person or brand in snowboarding to the punters is...

• Shaun White, who has a massive 2.4 million Facebook likes.

At this point we have switched to a less useful comparison of global figures against the US snowboarders overall number, but I'm keeping it for a sense of scale. Here's a look at what the punters are interested in and influenced by in snowboarding:

Nothing and no one is more representative of what most snowboarders believe snowboarding to be than Shaun White.

Snowboarding is not our sport, it's the sport of punters.

It's not the sport of Signal, it's the sport of Burton and Nike.

It's not the sport about snowboard magazines, it's the sport of articles in in-flight magazines and in sunday newspaper supplements.

It's not the sport of Illicit Snowboarding, it's the sport of About.com.

&

It's not the sport of Travis Rice, it's the sport of Shaun White.


Shaun White isn't addicted to snowboarding. He doesn't snowboard all season, he's quite happy to do other things like skateboarding, play in a band, rub shoulders with celebrities, or flog stuff in Target. Sounds weird to us, but that's a closer description of the aspirations of your average snowboarder than Travis Rice who does nothing but snowboard, or me, or you, or any of the guys who wrote those opinion pieces.

Shaun White is snowboarding and it's probably time that we should all suck it up admit it to ourselves.

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50 Pictures of Shaun White being a dick representing snowboarding, nah fuck it, who am I kidding, it's 50 pictures of him being a dick.

Ed Leigh's article that sparked this all off 'Why I don't like Shaun White'  has mysteriously been removed from the Whitelines site. Perhaps they kissed and made up. I guess you'll have to read about it in their magazine (as if anyone reads those).

And Whitelines' riposte to their own article 'In Defence of Shaun White' is worth a read. It's a bit strange that they apparently don't talk to each other so they end up communicating by open opinion pieces. Look out for next week's article 'Fuck you Steve, it's your turn to make the coffee'.

Then there was the Angry Snowboarder piece 'It's not hate, it's disappointment', which kinda was hate, but good hate to read.

And finally ACM's article, also called 'In Defence of Shaun White', illustrating the current snowboard article title drought we're experiencing in the UK, which was also excellent, but lacked a comment section to soak up the vitriol.