Visitors to the Winter Olympics in Nagano Japan in 1998 were witnesses to the debut of snowboarding as an Olympic sport, it having been approved as such in 1994 by the International Olympic Committee. It is not surprising that it reached the world’s largest sports stage. Since the mid 1960s, an ever increasing number of snowboarders have taken to ski slopes around the world. Its popularity as a winter sport is perhaps best understood if you consider that in the mid 1980s snowboarding was allowed on less than ten percent of the ski areas in the United States; today it is permitted on over ninety-five percent.