After spending the last few weeks in China where snowboard blogs are forbidden, I arrived in London this weekend and suffering from a hefty dose of jet lag I headed over to the always strangely disappointing Ski & Snowboard Show. The Ski & Snowboard Show claim that they are ‘the largest consumer winter sports show in the world set in the heart of London’, which is a bit like me claiming that I’m the greatest snowboarder on earth sitting on my sofa. 

In amongst the crowd of shopportunists I found a few things of interest. If for some reason you didn’t make it to the biggest show in the London W14 8UX post code this weekend here are the top three products that will be rocking your snowboard world this season...

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…

A couple of months ago we took a look at 10 actresses you might spot snowboarding this season. Here's the long-anticipated follow-up - an internet stalk of eleven famous snowboarding actors and one ex-famous snowboarding actor...

Tom Sims was one of the founders of our sport and he is undoubtedly a snowboarding legend. Today we take a look back at his other great contribution to the sport – his awesome fashion sense...

The Achilles heel of snowboards is that they are absolutely no use for going uphill, as a result we are forced to use one of the following options:

• Hiking – Always worth avoiding
• Chairlifts – Practical, but dull
• Helicopters – Awesome, but you do need a tame pilot and they’re always tricky to find

But there is another option, and we’re busy trying to find a way to afford one right now...

This was in the back of this seasons's Transworld Snowboarding Gear Guide. How many Photoshop mistakes can you spot?

Also its a bit strange that the lad in the sunscreen commercial has no exposed skin at all. Headhunter don't seem to have much confidence in their product. Piz Buin on the other hand show how it should be done...

Snowboard Porn – Yup, we’ve gone there.

Last year we wrote an article on snowboarding tattoos and that article has become by far the most read part of our site. It’s so popular that the article now accounts for more than 25% of all the visitors who have ever come to the site. 

But since last year the internet has continued to fill up with more snowboarding inspired tattoos so it’s time for Snowboarding Tattoos 2 or I guess Snowboarding Tattwo. Because the first article ended up bringing so many readers to our site I image that this one will probably put us up somewhere in the Google/Facebook range…

Last week this website disappeared and our internet connection broke, which made fixing the site very tricky. After hitting a lot of buttons and studying the art of waiting, the Illicit Snowboarding is back. While things were broken I took the off-line time to make the site look different. Kind of going for a snowboard top sheet with stickers look for the new season.

Normal service will resume shortly.

This is a movie that was released in 2002 and I’m amazed that I’d never heard of it until recently - It is epic. Set in the brilliantly named Karawanken Range in Austria and featuring Pete Sampras’ wife, normally reliable actor Rufus Sewell, and some bloke who used to be in EastEnders, it’s a budget version of Cliffhanger with going-down-mountains replacing the going-up-mountains format. The working tile was “The Extremists” but due to other events at the time that had to be dropped rapidly...