Wakeboarding History

Wakeboarding is an extreme water sport. Wakeboarding history begins with surfing as the wakeboard took its design inspiration from surfboards. This came long after cable wakeboarding had begun to spread as a popular culture. It was Bruno Rexin a German engineer, who conceptualized the design of the cable wakeboard during the 1950s when he experienced the thrills of water skiing for the first time while on a holiday to Holland. The need for a change in the design was felt when surfers could not paddle their way out of humongous waves. Find out more about wakeboarding in our Buzzle article.

Evolution of the Skurf Board
During the 1980s Tony Finn developed the SKURFER, which was a smaller sized surfboard. Though he was not the first to make the skurf board, this smaller version of the surfboard was created by board shaper Alln Byrne and his friend Kevin Jarett along with some other common friends. Allan Byrne lent one of his skurf boards to his friends from Queensland Australia, his name was Jeff Darby.

Tony Finn contacted Jeff Darby and undertook the Skurfer's production under a royalty. The skurfer board did not have feet straps in its initial designs but they were soon added so that the riders could perform complex tricks and maneuvers on them. The Skurfer.Inc mass manufactured the boards and soon more riders were picking up the skurfer, which was also known as the ski boards. Its designs kept getting better, more modifications were made so as to reduce its high buoyancy.

Three other prominent contributors in the history of wakeboarding were, Herb O'Brien who owned H.O Sports and companies 2 representatives - Murray and his brother Paul Fraser. The company had been trying to popularize the scurfer for snowboarders instead of snowboarding and that is when they came up with the idea of fixing feet binders on the similar lines of ski boots. They visualized the design of a snowboard on water. And that is how the new design came about and it as informally named the 'Wakeboard'.

H.O Sports manufactured the first neutral buoyancy wakeboard with the help of some of the best surfboard shapers from Hawaii that was compressed as well as molded. This unique design gave a huge boost to the popularity wakeboarding. Though the boards did not begin to get thinner until the first decade passed by, the boards that did come out, had sharper edges and phasers with dimples on the board that smoothened the ride as well as landing.

Debut in World Sports
Another huge step forward was when in 1989 the World Skiboard Association was founded and in 1990 ESPN organized the first ever Skurfer Championship in Hawaii, but not many signed up for the events because people were having difficulty in balancing on the boards. The next year the Hyper light wakeboard was manufactured, this year also saw Eric Perez battling hard in order to defend his title while competing against Darin Shapiro.

World Wakeboard Association
1992 also saw the first ever US National for wakeboarding in Colorado Springs, this event was hosted by Tommy Phillips. Soon after this, many wakeboarding competitions began to be held all over the US and it was enlisted as a competitive sport under the X Games II.The World Skiboard Association was founded by Redmon, which later renamed itself as the (WWA) World Wakeboard Association. Surfing and wakeboarding are interrelated, if you know how to surf you can skurf as well. So learn how to surf and skurf your way through the waves!

There were newer modifications being constantly added, that introduced twin forked tail on the wakeboards which let the riders ride easily and perform more extreme tricks on them. These twin tip boards come with a fin on either ends which makes a balanced central stance possible, while riding forward as well as while performing the switchstance or fakie style. In 1993 this extreme sports received permit for starting out with its own national publication which was called the 'Wake Boarding Magazine'. This magazine was launched by World Publications and is still one of the most popular magazines on this sport.

The year 1998 added another page to the wakeboarding history, as this was the year, two more competitions were added to the Pro Wakeboard Tour, they are the Vans Triple Crown of Wakeboarding and the Wakeboard World Cup which also introduced the sliders and jump ramps to the sports.