Episode One Of VBS’s Powder & Rails
August 27, 2008 – 9:17 pm PT by MikeTags: Powder & Rails, VBS.TV —
We’ve been waiting quite a while now for VBS’s new extreme sport series. If you’ve heard my comments before, you know I was hoping it would be a Rollerblade show but instead, we’re graced with Powder & Rails: a series based around the growth and development of snowboarding, going back to its birth. It’s a shame that riders of the sport don’t discuss its origin. I think they probably talk about Speedos more than they talk about early pioneers. So now, we are thankful that VBS has taken the responsibility to have a weekly series on the topic.
“In the late 80s, a bunch of skaters who were bored in the wintertime inadvertently made snowboarding what it is today. They filmed each other not with any sort of historic legacy in mind, but just because that’s what you do when you’re a bunch of dudes who ride around on a piece of fiberglass in the snow all day. Then people saw these videos and started to realize the potential for tricks and big air on a snowboard, and everything else took off from there.
For whatever reason, most snowboarders have never embraced their forerunners with the same enthusiasm as skaters and surfers. That’s why I decided to make this show—as a way of giving credit to the people who took snowboarding from a fringe hobby to something people get paid stupid amounts of money to do. Or at least that’ll be the first few episodes. We’ll see where it goes from there.”
