Jake Burton brought snowboarding to world stage

LIVIGNO, Italy — There might not be snowboarding at the Olympics — or snowboards at all — if it weren't for an entrepreneur named Jake Burton. And, in what feels like more than your garden-variety twist of fate, the grandmother of one of the sport's best riders at the Milan Cortina Games played a small role. Decades ago and a world away from the mountain, she hired Burton to mow her lawn. Defending slopestyle champion Zoi Sadowski-Synnott's grandma lived on Long Island in the 1970s and saw a flier offering "outdoor improvement" — everything from a complete overhaul of the backyard to a weekly lawn trimming. That business Burton ran as a teenager was one of the first flickers of an entrepreneurial spirit that ran deep and eventually created a sports behemoth — the Burton snowboard company. "When I met him, he was pretty lonely," said Burton's wife and business partner, Donna Carpenter, the owner of Burton who is in Livigno for the Olympics. "Nobody believed in him. Everyone thought he was crazy. He was working 11- 12-hour days by himself in the back of a barn. He was lonely, but he was pretty damn determined. He used to always say 'Success is the best revenge.'" Not long after Sadowski-Synnott signed with Burton, the families started comparing notes and the connection was made. Burton, by then known as Jake Burton Carpenter, passed away in 2019. This is the second Winter Olympics without him. But it's hard to overstate his importance in this sport. "I only met Jake once, at a Burton U.S. Open, right after I signed with Burton," Sadowski-Synnott said. "It was special. Without him, we wouldn't have snowboarding." Burton went from mowing lawns to New York University, where he graduated with a degree in economics, and then to Wall Street. In the late 1970s, he gave that up and moved back to Vermont to take a gamble. He wanted to see how far the "Snurfer," a pair of skis bolted together that was invented by Sherman Poppen a decade earlier, might take him. "I had a vision there was a sport there," Burton Carpenter said in a 2010 interview with The Associated Press. He spent years, if not decades, elbowing out room at resorts that wanted nothing to do with snowboarding, deeming both the contraption and their riders too rough, too grungy and too dangerous for the elite crowds they sought. By 1998, not only were resorts accepting snowboards, but the Olympics — worried about an aging fan base and the growing popularity of the X Games — "unilaterally decided snowboarding would be an Olympic sport," Donna Carpenter said. "I was thinking about it this week, and they need us in a way," Carpenter said. "They need that new culture of snowboarding and snowboarding brands and kind of allowing us to promote it in our own way." That might help explain why brand names and company logos that are virtually forbidden on the Olympic field of play are very much a part of snowboarding at the Games. It's hard to miss the name "Burton" stamped in massive font on the bottoms of more than half the snowboards flying high in that sport's five events. "Everywhere we go around here, we see his legacy," said two-time Olympic champion Anna Gasser, a Burton rider. It was not a smooth road. One of the classic stories Carpenter likes to tell is how, in the early days, her husband went on the road to sell snowboards to local stores. He left his house with 30 and came back with 35 "because some guy said, 'We don't want this crap,'" she said. That "crap" is now a billion-dollar-plus industry. According to the most recent industry surveys, snowboarders now make up between 30-40% of activity on the mountain. Gasser, a product of ski-centric Austria, is among the dozens who, with Burton's backing, bucked convention and made it big on a snowboard. This week, her board is adorned with a sticker that carries one of Burton's mottos: "At Burton, we take our fun seriously." One of Jake's closest friends, Canadian snowboarder Mark McMorris, placed a "Ride on Jake" sticker on the top of his binding. Asked for one of her favorite memories of the industry icon, Gasser recalled him taking a handful of Olympians — her, McMorris, Ayumu Hirano and others — on a helicopter trip to ride powder in the wilds of Canada after the Olympics one time. "There were no cameras, no pressure," Gasser said. "He wanted to remind us why we got into this. He said 'After the Olympics, you just go snowboarding because you love it.'"