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History
The practice of skiing dates back as far as 5000 years ago when early hunters and fisherman used animal tusks to traverse snow. Ski poles evolved from the walking sticks used for balance. Precursors of modern skis have been found in Scandinavia and Siberia, and date back to 2000 bc . However, the first written record of skis is attributed to Chinese historical accounts from ad 600. Competitive skiing started in Norway in 1767, and within 100 years it was a well-established activity in the Scandinavian countries. 1 The Olympics of 1924 were held in Paris, France as an honour to and request of the retiring IOC founder and president, Pierre de Coubertin. That same year, the town of Chamonix, France planned a winter sports festival and decided to petition the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to recognise this event. While the IOC did not sanction these games as Olympic Games, they did allow Chamonix to call the events an Olympic Winter Carnival. The surprising success of these games led the IOC to sanction a separate winter set of games, and the Winter Olympic Games were formally established in 1928. 2 St Moritz, Switzerland was the host city for these first sanctioned winter games, and nordic skiing comprised the only skiing event. In 1936, alpine skiing first appeared on the programme, but because of World War II, the winter Olympics were not held again until 1948. It was not until the Lake Placid Olympics in 1932 that competitive skiing really began to gain popularity in the USA. The numbers of skiers in the USA continued to increase, and today there are an estimated 15 million skiers of all ages in the USA, 200 million skiers worldwide, and an ever-growing number of snowboarders. According to the national sporting goods association data from 2008, 6.5 million Americans participated in skiing more than once and 5.9 million in snowboarding, both increases from previous years. 3 4
Snowboarding is a relatively new winter sport whose history dates back only to the 1920s, and the current style of snowboarding device was first introduced in the late 1970s. The increasing popularity of snowboarding over the past 20 years has continued to increase the number of people using ski slopes, and in...