Second of two parts. The first part of the series was published in the Feb. 19, 2026 edition of the Ledger-Transcript.
Paul Graves, a former professional Snurfer rider, helped transform snowboarding from a winter novelty into a popular winter sport. Despite being escorted off mountains and receiving rejection letters, Graves persisted in promoting the activity. He helped found the National Snurfing Association and organized exhibitions and competitions, including the first National Snow Surfing Championships in 1982 — a milestone that helped propel snowboarding toward mainstream popularity and eventual Olympic recognition.
Paul Graves of Dublin has stacks and shelves of three-ring binders with letters in polyurethane sleeves from ski areas to the sports divisions of television networks.
Winter resorts still viewed Graves and his cohort as disrupters, and even though TV networks — all three of them in those days — devoted their weekend programming largely to sports, snowboarding was still outside the tent.
“We weren’t a threat to anybody — people or any industry, but skiers thought I was wrong. They were upset,” said Graves.
Not even a fledgling network called ESPN thought anybody would want to watch snowboarding. Graves approached the network in 1981 to see if it had interest in the National Snow Surfing Championship early the following year. ESPN’s programming coordinator wrote to Graves saying that they “were not looking for such a product at this time.”
Shrugging off the rejection, Graves plowed on, and a grainy photo of him adorns a poster announcing the preliminaries for the National Snow Surfing Championship in Vermont at what is now Saskadena Six, then known as Suicide Six. The results of competitions in slalom and downhill are preserved on yellowed sheets, noting 10.55 seconds for runs down “The Face,” an advanced trail on the mountain.
“It was their toughest black diamond,” said Graves. “We started with 120 competitors or so. Some guys got banged up on their first run and didn’t take another.”
Asked how he was able to pull this event together, Graves looked back to the TV commercial he shot for Labatt’s Brewery years earlier.
“The beer commercial checks,” he said.
With a growing family, however, Graves saw the need to redirect some energy and admitted that he was “burnt out” from all his efforts. He gifted the event at Suicide Six to Jake Burton, and turned his attention to representing emerging snow surfers to sponsors.
In 2010, Smithsonian magazine ranked that first championship fourth among the 10 most important events in snowboarding history, noting that “the National Snow Surfing Championships helped put snowboarding on the map. Organized by champion snurfer Paul Graves, the contest drew 125 contestants to Vermont’s Suicide Six resort and riders were seen sailing down the hill at speeds in excess of 50 miles per hour on both ‘The Today Show’ and ‘Good Morning America.’”
The event moved to Stratton Mountain, one of the first mountains to allow snowboarders on its slopes. It still hosts “Homesick,” an annual event celebrating the sport’s history.
Building the business
Graves attended Ski Instructor Association trade shows in Las Vegas to promote the sport, and at the 1982 show, he was approached by Kazuo Ogura, an importer-exporter from Japan.
Graves created patches for clothing to promote the sport in Japan. More meetings followed, which would pay big dividends in the next decade. He was becoming an entrepreneur during these years. By the mid-1980s, he had his own company, Swingbo, which produced the Alpine Surfer board.
The sport — and demand for boards — had exploded to the point that Graves would choose Europe as the place to film a promotional video for his company. He still knew that the sport would find its way to the Olympics, but even before then, the Olympic motto of “faster, higher, stronger” had become the zeitgeist of the sport.
“People were looking for the jump, the hit, getting air, going backwards, spinning,” Graves said. “Gnarly, rad, stoked; we might as well have been speaking Pig Latin.”
Between language new to the slopes and the clothing necessary to snowboard, the image of “bad boys” in the sport emerged.
Sports Illustrated took notice. Correspondent Alexander Wolff wrote that “a culture was emerging, but it wasn’t a skiing culture,” and Graves noticed a double standard.
“People at resorts were asking snowboarders, ‘Can you safely do this?’ but nobody asked skiers that question when they showed up at a mountain,” Graves said. “So what was needed was instruction to please these folks. Paul Johnston, the mountain manager of Stratton, let us in for that,” Graves said, adding that there was even a certification program to demonstrate ability, and people who wanted to snowboard on certain mountains had to commit to lessons.
“But snowboarders were still pounding at the doors of places, and suddenly something dawned on the owners of ski resorts,” Graves said. “Snowboarders can buy lift tickets.” And boots and boards, and boards could be rented out. Capitalism helped open the doors even further.
By the late 1980s, things at the Ski Instructor Association shows had changed.
“Snowboarding took over the shows. And state by state, we got accepted,” Graves said.
ESPN also eventually went where “Wide World of Sports” hadn’t, and in 1995, the Extreme Games were born. In 1995, Ogura, the importer Graves had met years earlier, became managing director of Burton Snowboards Japan. The following year, Gov. Howard Dean named Graves an Ambassador of the State of Vermont for the Office of Travel and Tourism based on all his efforts in the state, beginning at Woodstock.
A year after that, in 1997, snowboarding appeared at the Winter X-Games. The following year, Graves’ prediction proved true; snowboarding debuted as a competition at the Nagano Olympics in Japan. Men and women competed in the halfpipe and giant slalom events.
“We were finally at the big dance,” Graves said with pride. He recalled how CBS Sports previewed the events. “We’re now going to introduce a new sport,” the commentary began, segueing into a six-minute video on the new event — narrated by Graves.
With the new millennium, the ostracism that Graves had experienced years earlier was flipped on its head.
“Everyone who once shunned our efforts was now bending over backwards to be involved. Ski companies were developing snowboarding products in addition to small companies trying to grab a piece of the pie,” he said, adding that the growth of strictly skiing took a dip in this era. “Snowboarders were showing up at mountains in droves, keeping the cash registers full.”
By 2000, ESPN had incorporated the sport into its Winter X-Games. The venue was Mount Snow, Vt., and 10 different divisions of competition took to the powder, in categories from slopestyle and big air to halfpipe and full pipe. Women were now competing, an important point for Graves.
“I was representing snowboarders at that point,” said Graves, who was focused on getting emerging riders sponsorships. He was in his 40s by then, and confessed that years on the slopes had begun to take their toll on his body. He also noticed something evident in other sports — male chauvinism.
“As the father of two daughters, this was unacceptable,” he said. “I could see the difficulties women were facing getting sponsors, compared to men.”
The prize money being awarded was also not equal. Being a figure central to the development of the sport helped Graves to push for equality.
“Snowboarding corrected this faster than other sports,” he said.
At the U.S. Open Snowboarding Championship in the previous decade, men and women took home equal first-place prizes of $45,000. It wasn’t until 2022 that a lawsuit forced the U.S. Soccer Federation to pay the men’s and women’s national teams equally.
Building the future of snowboarding
Graves was also the snowboarding head coach at Dublin School from 2015 to 2019. A year later, someone Graves had seen emerge onto the snowboarding scene, Zeb Powell, became the first Black snowboarder to win gold at the 2020 X-Games.
Graves takes pride in his relationship with the 25-year-old, who wowed more than 20,000 spectators at City Hall Plaza in Boston, flying over snow imported from New Hampshire for the Red Bull Heavy Metal Event.
And last April, then 16-year-old Haven Kennedy of Dublin — part of what Graves calls “the next generation of snowboarding” — came in ahead of older snowboarders at the National Amateur Championship.
An icon of the sport
In 2016, Graves was inducted into the Vermont Ski and Snowboarding Museum as an icon of the sport. Founded in 1988 as the Vermont Ski Museum, it added snowboarding to its title “to properly reflect what had happened on the slopes over the past 30 years,” according to its website.
Graves has headlined a variety of events at the Stowe museum over the years, including a panel discussion on “Influential Women of Snowboarding” that he moderated in late 2020.
“I was honored to be inducted into the museum,” he said.