LIVIGNO, Italy (AP) — There may not be any snowboarding at the Olympic Games – or snowboards at all – if it weren’t for an entrepreneur named Jake Burton.
And, in what appears to be more than just a twist of fate, the grandmother of one of the sport’s best riders at the Milan Cortina Games played a small role. Decades ago, far from the mountains, she hired Burton to mow her lawn.
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Reigning Slopestyle Champion Zoi Sadowski-Synnott Grandma was living on Long Island in the 1970s and saw a flyer offering “exterior improvements” – everything from a complete backyard overhaul to weekly mowing of the lawn. This company that Burton ran as a teenager was one of the first signs of an entrepreneurial spirit that blossomed deeply and eventually created a sports giant: the Burton snowboard company.
“When I met him, he was pretty lonely,” said Burton’s wife and business partner, Donna Carpenter, Burton’s owner who is in Livigno for the Olympics. “No one believed in him. Everyone thought he was crazy. He worked alone for 11 to 12 hours a day in the back of a barn. He was alone, but he was damn determined. He always said, ‘Success is the best revenge.'”
Shortly after Sadowski-Synnott signed with Burton, the families began comparing notes and the connection was made. Burton, then known as Jake Burton Carpenter, died 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 the Burton US Open, right after I signed with Burton,” Sadowski-Synnott said. “It was special. Without him we wouldn’t be go snowboarding.
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Burton went from mowing lawns to New York University, where he earned a degree in economics, and then to Wall Street.
In the late 1970s, he abandoned that idea and returned to Vermont to take a gamble. He wanted to see how far the “Snurfer,” a pair of bolted-together skis invented by Sherman Poppen a decade earlier, could take him.
“I had a vision that there was a sport there,” Burton Carpenter said in a 2010 interview with The Associated Press.
He spent years, even decades, jockeying for resorts that wanted nothing to do with snowboarding, deeming both the machine and their riders too rough, too dirty and too dangerous for the elite crowds they sought.
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By 1998, not only were resorts accepting snowboarding, but the Olympics — worried about its 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 some way,” Carpenter said. “They need this new culture of snowboarding and snowboard brands and allowing us to kind of promote it in our own way.”
This could help explain why brand names and company logos that are all but banned from the Olympic playing field are an integral part of snowboarding at the Games.
It’s hard not to notice the name “Burton” emblazoned in large letters on the bottom of more than half of the snowboards flying high in the sport’s five events.
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“Everywhere we go here we see his legacy,” said Anna Gasser, double Olympic championa Burton driver.
The road has not been easy.
One of the classic stories Carpenter likes to tell is how, in the early days, her husband would go on the road selling 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.
This “shit” is now a billion-dollar-plus industry. According to the most recent industry surveys, snowboarders now represent between 30 and 40% of mountain activity.
Gasser, a native of ski-centric Austria, is one of dozens of people who, with Burton’s support, have bucked convention and found success on a snowboard.
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This week, his board is adorned with a sticker that bears 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.
When asked what one of his favorite memories of the industry icon was, Gasser recalled taking a handful of Olympians — her, McMorris, Ayumu Hirano and others — on a helicopter trip to ride powder in the Canadian wilderness after the Olympics.
“There were no cameras, no pressure,” Gasser said. “He wanted to remind us why we got into this adventure. He said, ‘After the Olympics, you snowboard because you love it.'”
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PA Winter Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/milan-cortina-2026-winter-olympics
