The World's Fastest Growing Water Sport

Since its invention in the late 1980's, wakeboarding has taken the watersports world by storm. A sister sport to surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding, wakeboarding has extended the popular boardsports lifestyle to thousands of lake bound summer boarders.

Where did wakeboarding originate from? To answer this, we must first consider the influences, and they are from other water and boardsports such as surfing, skateboarding, and water skiing. From these different sports, wakeboarding was spawned as a mixture of all the sports, with some other ideas blended in. Un-like snowboarding, there is really no solid history for wakeboarding, but of course there are the few important people and events that have helped mold and shape wakeboarding as it is today.

Tony Finn, a surfer from San Diego was an important pioneer. Mixing together the surfboard and water ski, he designed what is known as the "skurfer". Being basically a small surfboard with no straps that attached the rider to the board, the skurfer was hard to get up on and riders were limited to carving. In the summer of 1985 Tony's two windsurfing friends, Mike and Mark Pascoe gave Tony foot straps which were drilled into the board, a very important contribution.

Now fastened to the skurfer, the rider could perform aerials, with the new ability to get air off the wake. This improvement however, rendered it hard to do deep-water starts and to keep the board on the surface of the water. Struggling, the sport was saved by Herb O'Brien. Herb owned H.O. Sports and was extremely knowledgeable about watersports. He got together with some of Hawaii's best surfboard shapers in 1990 and made the first compression molded, neutral buoyancy wakeboard, the Hyperlite.

Neutral buoyancy gave the board the ability to float as well as the able to be submerged without a lot of effort, unlike a surfboard, which is almost impossible to submerge. This technology launched the sport into gear, being named skiboarding for awhile, but wakeboarding soon became the official name. With continuing refinement and research Herb O'Brien added a "twin tip" shape to the board. This allowed a rider to be able to ride switch stance.

Jimmy Redmon, who founded the World Wakeboard Association (WWA), then started making rules and formats for competitions, beginning the wakeboard competitions. The sport took off in 1992 when World Sports & Marketing began running pro wakeboard events. This gave the sport the recognition it deserved and exposure on ESPN and ESPN2.

Fact: Wakeboards now outsell water skis 20 to 1