: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.
:45:01
And kids these days get to
ride that kind of stuff everyday.
:45:11
A key element of contests in general
was the fact that you got media out there...
:45:16
and those photographers would
open the eyes of millions of people.
:45:20
Every single kid would look
at those magazines and go,
"Oh, my God, I want to do that. "
:45:24
[ Richards ] Magazines were
a way to show progression.
It was a way to show trends.
:45:28
It was a way to touch
everyone all over the world about
what was happening in our sport.
:45:34
But then, with the advent of
the snowboard video, we were like,
:45:37
Whoa, snowboarding's
way different than the way we do it.
Let's do it that way.
:45:46
[Rippey] When I first started snowboarding,
the stars ofthe sport, to me,
were the guys that were in the videos.
:45:51
You know, Damian Sanders,
Craig Kelly, guys like that.
:45:55
I mean, I would
watch a video 25 times, easy.
:45:58
Film is the biggest influence
on snowboarding.
Maybe more so than contests.