Strange fact: The majority of snowboards are not built by the snowboard brands. That's something most snowboarders aren't aware of and most of the companies keep very quiet about. It's all about as transparent as an internal FIFA inquiry, so we thought we'd try and figure out exactly what's going on and shed some light on it...

Immediately after I posted last week's honest slogans article, Brooke Geery from the YoBeat, dropped me a message to let me know that she'd LOL'd, then she had a stab at predicting the number of people who would read it. Her prediction was eerily spot-on, which means she's clearly some sort of internet witch. It got us wondering how good normal people are at predictions, because although everyone loves making predictions, usually no one bothers to check the results. We figured the best way to check was to see how different people's predictions panned out at the 'Lympics...

For several years we've been creating infographics to help visualise different aspects of snowboarding. One thing we've almost entirely avoided using so far is the much maligned pie chart, described by this guy as, "easily the worst way to convey information ever developed in the history of data visualization". This week we challenge our fears and give this plucky little underdog a chance. And it's also a chance for you to win big by giving it a shot too, thanks to the team at Extreme Pie who have agreed to supply the prize. Sometimes this stuff just writes itself... 

We came across this pack of Top Trumps Snowboarders the other day and figured it would be worth a look. Little did we know that this unassuming pack of cards would provide the irrefutable truth that someone among us is the greatest sportsman ever...

I'm a bit concerned that the people who analyse the snowsports industry are a bit crap at their jobs. I guess if they were good they'd be working in banking...

This week we've created a new way to waste some of your spare time before next season. Can you name the 25 ski areas in this huge dose of Photoshoppery? ...

This week, for a rare change of focus we've headed off to the Burton European Open in Laax, courtesy of Nokia, to attempt some live event reporting. So far things haven't got off to a great start, the first two days of qualification have had to be cancelled due to high winds and a dumping of fresh snow. The only thing happening on the course today was me cutting some fresh tracks right down the middle of it.

So in a change to our anticipated schedule of dry event reporting and tedious interviews, we've decided to pay homage to the other great feature of the BEO...the fact that it all takes place on a mountain called Crap.

There's a whole hour of winterwanderwegging Crap to the right.

And this great feature of Laax, along with a lethal combination of puerile minds with too much spare time, inevitably started us thinking of other dubiously named mountains, resorts and ski trails like the gloriously seedy...

So, in what must be the best piece of event reporting from the BEO you're going to get, we brought all the names into one convenient format, and are proud to bring you - The Übermap of Dirty Ski Resort Names...

Over the last few weeks ESPN have been releasing some great articles on the effects of avalanches in the US. They’re now mid-way through a run of six articles and they’re also mid-way to scaring me into never snowboarding off-piste again. It’s time to take a look at the stats and see just how close to a horrible avalanchy death we really are…

A couple of years back we took a look at all the big faceless corporations that exist behind the familiar brands of snowboarding (and skiing, and skateboarding, and surfing, and now rollerblading) and it was surprising to see just how big and seemingly unrelated to the sport they were. It's time to take another look and see what's changed over the last two and a half years...

Back in the 70s and 80s snowboarding was a bit simpler. You grabbed a snowboard which would be pretty much the same as everyone else’s snowboard, you went to one of the few places that allowed snowboarding, hung out with the small but close-knit community of fellow snowboarders, if you got good you could compete with any other snowboarder in the slalom and the halfpipe in the few events that existed and if you were really good you could star that season’s film.

Then all of a sudden things started to get a bit more complicated…

In the 90s the only conversation that anybody had in the world of winter sports was the snowboarding vs. skiing debate. Every single person had a fervent opinion on the subject apparently based loosely on something they thought they’d overheard someone say, one time in the pub. Over the years though, things have become more and more subdued as everyone slowly got a grip. Today the only people who still cling on to the hate are the occasional clueless punter (inevitably wearing a faded one-piece and rocking a pair of monstrously long straight-edge skis) who has somehow skipped an entire decade without noticing. Today there’s a whole generation of skiing and snowboarding kids that have no idea they should have an incredibly strong and misplaced opinion on the topic based on whether they happened to be given a snowboard or a pair of skis by Santa.

We wondered why everything had gone quiet and decided it was time to rehash this debate one more time. To spice things up we also decided that this time we’d actually look at the facts…

Back in May the Angry Snowboarder wrote an editorial called “Played Out Marketing Pitches” where he rounded on some of the snowboard companies that use pointlessly generic sales pitches such as “by riders, for riders” and “putting the fun back into snowboarding” to sell their kit. One of the things he mentioned in that article was a company called Monson which builds snowboards for a whole bunch of brands who then flog the same snowboard to the public dressed up in a different graphic and smothered in great steaming piles of marketing crap. A few months down the line and with a new season upon us we thought it would be interesting to see how each of the companies  are selling this year’s fresh crop of Monson snowboards. 

As the Angry Snowboarder says in that article, “If you’re going to run a company you seriously need to bring something to the table beyond played out pitches and cookie cutter technology, otherwise it’s just a different graphic on the same old shit”. To test out whether people were following that sage advice we tracked one particular Monson board, the ‘C6’, to see what spin each brand put on their marketing of that board and what price they gave it. We found 11 different ways you can buy the same board, epic lashings of sales diarrhoea and amazingly depending on who you buy from you could spend anything between $300 and $570 on exactly the same snowboard…

With the gear guides and snowboard review season in full swing and people contemplating their next snowboard purchase its the time of year we hear a lot of blag from a plethora of snowboard companies about why their company is better than everyone else's, as they try to make their products stand out in a busy marketplace. To try and make sense of some of these claims we wanted to find a way to display the background of the different companies so that we could really see how they all compare.


We've spent the last few days researching the company histories of the major snowboard makers and putting it all into a pretty infographic. From the chart you can see how old the companies are, how long they've been making snowboards, which companies are independent and which are owned or licensed by other companies. Some of the things we found surprised us...

Being a snowboard entrepreneur isn’t an easy career. It takes ambition, a whole variety of skills, a lot of graft and a hefty dose of good fortune to turn a snowboarding passion into a successful business and a whole dollop more of all three things to really make it big. For every Jake Burton, there are thousands of people who crashed and burned like Lady Di at some point in the process. Today we take three of the early snowboarding entrepreneurs and compare the rise and fall of their fortunes, through the medium of a handy chart...

According the Daily Mail, sometime next year the first child with three biological parents could be born in the UK. As a result of this news the Daily Mail audience is as usual going mental, but I’m not sure they need to get their knickers in quite so much of a twist. There just might be something in this technique. It did after all work out well for snowboarding. 

Snowboarding evolved from three sports; skiing, surfing and skateboarding. We wanted to show what snowboarding had inherited from those sports and what it’s given back, and to do that we created this handy infographic…

Click on the image if you want to see a larger version

There’s more after the break

We‘re currently in the midst of the snowboard industry’s glitzy awards show season and at this time of year everyone is busy ranking snowboarders. Transworld Snowboarding threw the latest show on the 29^th of January when they hosted the 12^th Annual Riders Poll Awards. In those awards 100 professional snowboarders voted for their rider of the year from a shortlist of just 3 people. That doesn’t sound like a great way of deciding these things to us. You wouldn’t, for example, want the presidency of the United States to be decided by 100 politicians from a short list of 3 people that Rupert Murdock had bodged together.


This week we decided to find out if there was a better way of deciding these things. We wanted to find a more scientific method of measuring something as intangible as snowboarding and we wanted to find a method that allowed us to compare a lot more than just 3 snowboarders. Here’s what we found...

Google run the internet and they watch and record every single thing you do online, which is bad for things like personal privacy, but great for producing interesting snowboarding statistics.  They've just released the Google Zeitgeist which is a list of the most searched terms in 2010. Snowboarding clearly doesn't have the same significant global impact as the earthquake in Haiti, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or Justin Beiber, but we did find a few interesting things and while we were at it we took a look at some of the other snowboarding related stats we could ply from Google’s cold electric soul. In this article we find out lots of exciting snowboard facts including:

• Which country loves snowboarding the most
• What the kick-ass Boy Scouts were wearing in 1983, and...
• Is Shaun White bigger than snowboarding?

This season Burton have jazzed up the rider profiles of some of their top pros by building some interactive autobiographical timelines. They obviously got their inspiration from our snowboard history timeline. It’s a good way to display the history of each snowboarder and its worth a look at some point. What we that we found interesting though, was that it gave us a quick way to compare the development of each snowboarder to see if there were any interesting trends. Fortunately for this article there were plenty of interesting trends and we’ve even managed scrape enough together to produce a handy infographic. Read on if you are:

• A snowboarder wondering when you are going to get that huge Burton contract, or more likely, at what point you missed the gravy train.
• Interested in seeing what kind of genetic monster you would produce if you mixed all the super-pros together to produce an average.
• Planning to turn the fruit of your loins into the next Shaun White. Think of this as a how-to guide to producing your very own snowboarding superstar/retirement fund…

Other then the Olympics the only time that skiing and snowboarding really makes the news is when someone dies. The amount of press coverage is determined by a complex equation using variables such as; how old the people were, how famous they were, and more recently an obsession with whether they were wearing a helmet or not. But the factor that has by far the biggest impact and guarantees a veritable press frenzy is when a large number of people are killed or injured, and the most consistent and successful mass killer of skiers and snowboarders is the ski lift. Today we take a look at over sixty years of ski lift accidents using a couple of infographics…

91 Words for Snow is still one of the best snowboard DVDs out there. It’s a movie that looks at the wide variety of disciplines that the sport of snowboarding includes and the title comes from the story that the Eskimos have 91 different words for snow. Unfortunately that story is an urban legend, because in reality the Eskimo language have about the same number of words for snow as English has. It got us wondering though, how many words for snowboard are there? As there is clearly only one word for that in English, and that would be an extremely short and miserable blog post, we decided to find out what the word for snowboard was in the other languages of the world…