Jake Burton Carpenter was snowboarding visionary
Whether you had a gold medal hanging from your neck, were just learning how to stand on a snowboard, or were one of those flustered skiers wondering where all the kids in the baggy pants were coming from, you knew the name “Burton.”
Jake Burton Carpenter, the man who changed the game on the mountain by fulfilling a grand vision of what a snowboard could be, died Wednesday night of complications stemming from a relapse of testicular cancer. He was 65.
In an email sent to the staff at Burton, CEO John Lacy called Carpenter “our founder, the soul of snowboarding, the one who gave us the sport we love so much.”
Carpenter was not the inventor of the snowboard. But 12 years after Sherman Poppen tied together a pair of skis with a rope to create what was then called a “Snurfer,” the 23-year- old entrepreneur, then known only as Jake Burton, quit his job in Manhattan, moved back to Vermont and went about dreaming of how far a snowboard might take him.
“I had a vision there was a sport there, that it was more than just a sledding thing, which is all it was then,” Burton said in a 2010 interview with The Associated Press. For years, Burton’s snowboards were largely snubbed at resorts — its dimensions too untested, its riders too unrefined, its danger all too real — and many wouldn’t allow them to share the slopes with the cultured ski elite in Colorado or California or, heaven forbid, the Swiss Alps.
But those riders were a force of nature. And for all their risk-taking, rulebreaking, sidewinding trips down the mountain, they spent money, too. Throughout the last decade, snowboarders have accounted for more than 25 percent of visitors to mountain resorts in the United States. They have bankrolled a business worth more than $1 billion annually — a big chunk of which is spent on Burton gear.
“People take it for granted now,” said Pat Bridges, a longtime writer for Snowboarder Magazine, who has followed the industry for decades. “They don’t even realize that the name ‘Burton’ isn’t a company. It’s a person. Obviously, it’s the biggest brand in snowboarding. The man himself is even bigger.”
In 1998, and with Carpenter’s tacit blessing, the Olympics got in on the act, in hopes of injecting some youth into an older- skewing program filled with ski jumpers, bobsledders, figure skaters and hockey players.
As the years passed, Carpenter straddled the delicate line between the “lifestyle sport” he’d helped create — one that professed to value fun over winning, losing, money or Olympic medals — and the mass-marketing behemoth snowboarding was fast becoming.
“He saw himself as a steward to snowboarding,” Bridges said. “I’m not saying he was infallible, or that he always made the right choices. But at least that was always part of his calculus: ‘ What impact is this decision going to have on snowboarding?’”
Though Burton is a private company that does not release financials, its annual sales were north of $500 million as of 2015. In addition to the hundreds of retail stores that sell the company’s merchandise, Burton has 30 flagship shops in America.