Jake Burton Carpenter
Snowboarding trailblazer who took the sport around the world
JAKE BURTON CARPENTER, who has died of cancer aged 65, was a pioneer of snowboarding who helped to popularise the sport around the world.
He began making snowboards in 1977, when they were banned from every US ski slope. He was not the only one to push the new leisure pursuit, but as he put it: “We were all just chasing it. But I was chasing it better than anybody else.”
Carpenter’s stroke of genius was to devise a snowboard that afforded the same level of control as skis. Now his company is worth $700 million and has a 32 per cent share of the global market – but for all his business acumen, he remained most at home on the slopes: “He’s like the cool dad of the sport,” said the triple Olympic gold medallist Shaun White in 2015.
Jake Burton Carpenter was born on April 29 1954 and brought up on Long Island, the youngest of four children (a brother was killed in the Vietnam War). When he was 14 he bought a
“snurfer” – forerunner to the snowboard, invented a few earlier by Sherm Poppen – and attended the University of Colorado in Boulder, but his hopes of making the college skiing team were wrecked by a car accident, and he dropped out.
He eventually graduated in Economics from New York University, and in 1977, following a brief stint in a Manhattan investment bank he remembered his snurfer – which he described as “like a primitive snowboard without bindings” – and began improving the design (“I kept waiting for someone to take it to the next level and no one was, so I figured I’d do it,” he recalled).
Moving to Stratton, Vermont, he worked part-time in a bar while he worked on his prototype, and within a year, aided by a $200,000 bequest from his grandmother, he was up and running with his new company, which he named Burton. It was, he later admitted, a “get rich quick” scheme at first.
Though sales were initially slow, by the time he met his future wife and business partner, Donna, in the early 1980s, it was a million-dollar concern.
There was resistance from the skiing fraternity, who objected to the sometimes rowdy behaviour of the young snowboarders – “we had one board, we didn’t have ski boots, we didn’t have poles, we were just anti-establishment,” he recalled.
But when he designed a new model giving enhanced control, matters improved. The Carpenters operated from Austria in the 1980s, returning to Vermont at the end of the decade, when Donna became chief financial officer.
Snowboarding’s big moment came in 1998 at Nagano in Japan, when it made its Olympic debut. Burton began acquiring smaller companies, but hit problems during the global financial crisis. The
Carpenters laid off staff and cut wages, and stopped drawing their own salaries, but weathered the storm.
Jake Carpenter recovered from testicular cancer in 2012 – though the illness would later return – and he suffered from Miller Fisher syndrome, a nervous disorder that left him for a time paralysed and unable to breathe on his own.
He recovered sufficiently to be there at Pyeongchang in South Korea when Shaun White won his third Olympic title.
In 2015 Carpenter had stepped back from the business to concentrate on designing, while Donna, who he married in 1983, took over the reins; she survives him, along with their son, and two other sons from a previous relationship.