Random Snowboarding Athletes Generator

So the tool gave you a snowboarder

You wanted a snowboarder and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It spans the halfpipe riders, the slopestyle and big air specialists who throw themselves off enormous jumps, and the alpine racers who carve gates on stiff boards and get almost no attention at all.

The tool is the simple part. Snowboarding has the most interesting relationship with the idea of being a sport of anything on this site, because for most of its life it actively did not want to be one.

The mountains did not want them

It is easy to forget how recently snowboarding was treated as a nuisance. Through the 1980s the great majority of American ski resorts simply banned snowboards from their lifts. Skiers regarded snowboarders as loud, scruffy, dangerous and, worst of all, young. Snowboarders returned the compliment. A handful of resorts have never lifted the ban and still, to this day, permit skis only.

Out of that exclusion came the character of the thing. Snowboarding grew up outside the institutions, in car parks and backcountry and homemade pipes, borrowing its language and its clothes and its attitude from skateboarding and surfing rather than from alpine ski clubs. It was a culture first and a competition second. That inheritance still shapes what you see on television: the deliberate scruffiness, the reluctance to look like it is trying, the fact that riders whoop for each other's runs. Every athlete on this list belongs to a discipline that was, within living memory, not allowed on the hill.

The champion who refused the Olympics

Snowboarding entered the Olympics in 1998, and its finest rider did not go.

Terje Haakonsen, the Norwegian who was then the most respected snowboarder alive, boycotted the Nagano Games. His objection was structural: the International Olympic Committee had handed the governance of snowboarding to the international skiing federation, the very body that represented the sport snowboarders had spent two decades being excluded by, rather than to snowboarding's own organisation. Riders would have to qualify through a system they had no say in. Haakonsen said, in effect, that a sport should not be run by people who do not do it, and he stayed home.

He was widely supported and it changed nothing, and snowboarding has been an Olympic sport ever since, and one of the most watched events of the Winter Games. But the argument he made has never gone away, and it explains something about why this sport's stars can seem faintly embarrassed by their own medals. The tension between culture and federation is the sport's permanent condition.

The halfpipe and the spin race

The event that made snowboarding famous is the halfpipe: a huge semicircular trench of snow, walls seven metres high, down which a rider bounces from side to side, launching out of the top and rotating.

What happened next is an arms race with no obvious end. Every generation adds another half-rotation. Shaun White, who has three Olympic golds and who is on this list twice over because he was also a professional skateboarder, dragged the sport into the era of the double cork, two off-axis flips combined with multiple spins. Ayumu Hirano landed a triple cork at the Olympics and won. Chloe Kim won the halfpipe at seventeen and then again four years later, the first woman to defend it. The riders now go so high above the lip that the physics of landing is the actual problem, and the danger is not theoretical. A halfpipe is a concrete-hard trench, and everybody on this list has hit it.

The woman who won on both

Here is my favourite thing on this list, and it is a name that appears here and also on the skiing tool, which is not a mistake.

Ester Ledecká of the Czech Republic is a snowboarder. At the 2018 Winter Olympics she entered the alpine skiing super-G, a speed event on skis, as an afterthought, ranked forty-third in the world, on a pair of skis borrowed from Mikaela Shiffrin. She won it. The commentators assumed the timing system had broken. She looked at the scoreboard for a long moment with an expression of pure confusion, having beaten the finest downhill racers alive. A week later she went back to her snowboard and won the parallel giant slalom too. Nobody in the history of the Winter Olympics had ever won gold in two different sports at the same Games, and it is difficult to imagine anybody doing it again. Draw her name from this tool and you have pulled the strangest achievement in winter sport.

What a random snowboarder is good for

• Winter Olympics sweepstakes. Draw riders for a group during the halfpipe or slopestyle finals.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a name and go and watch their runs. The alpine racers in particular are almost never broadcast and are extraordinary.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Most people can name Shaun White and stop. This list goes considerably deeper.
• Settling a debate. Pull two riders and argue it out, contest results against influence on the culture.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a rider, research their discipline, and look up how recently their sport was banned from the mountain.

Snowboarding questions

Were snowboards really banned from ski resorts?

Yes. Through the 1980s most American resorts refused to allow snowboards, and a small number still do not permit them today. That exclusion shaped the sport's culture, which grew up outside the established ski institutions.

Why did Terje Haakonsen boycott the Olympics?

Because snowboarding at the 1998 Games was placed under the governance of the international skiing federation rather than snowboarding's own body. He objected to a sport being run by people who did not ride, and refused to compete.

Did somebody really win Olympic gold on skis and a snowboard?

Yes. Ester Ledecká of the Czech Republic won the alpine skiing super-G at the 2018 Games on borrowed skis, then won the snowboard parallel giant slalom at the same Olympics. No other athlete has won gold in two different sports at a single Winter Games.

Can I pull several riders, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. International Ski and Snowboard Federation. fis-ski.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, snowboarding. britannica.com