‘Big-Air Snowboarding’ to Make Its Big Olympic Debut<br />That may all be sports trivia, but it’s about to become important trivia,<br />because soon, in this very winter of 2018 — 80 years after Trumbull’s breakthrough — will occur the Olympic debut of a sport known as “big-air snowboarding,” which is the snurfing equivalent of big-wave surfing.<br />Hawaii: Accept this small restoration of roots as a gesture of solidarity, an arm around your shoulder<br />on the curb outside the gas station as we say, “What happened in there was not cool.”<br />The history of snowboarding, or as it was known then, “snurfing” (i.e., snow-surfing), does<br />not begin in Michigan in the 1960s with boards made by a guy named Sherman Poppen.<br />One biggie that is more clearly attributable to human error: collisions — most often between a rider<br />and a stationary object, like a tree or a finish-line pillar (the Swiss champion Daniel Loetscher died in the latter way).<br />A guy in Colorado was snowboarding along and hit an ice patch, which accelerated him to some ungodly speed,<br />and he zoomed into a “boundary marker rope,” which wrapped him up and strangled him or snapped his neck.
