Wakeboard History: Where Does Wakeboarding Come From?

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Wakeboard history – Life in our time is more diverse than ever. Whether it’s fashion, food, cars, design, or sports, there is hardly an area of life these days from which you can’t draw from an incredible variety of possibilities.

Especially in the sports sector, many new sports have sprung up in recent decades, which at the same time enjoy ever-increasing popularity.

The grey season is over, summer will soon be around the corner again. There is nothing better than combining sports with sun, beach and good mood, laughter, and water, namely water sports.

Water sports are not only popular due to the refreshment, but also healthy. The most popular water sports include wakeboarding, water skiing, surfing, stand-up paddling, rafting, swimming, diving, sailing, rowing, and canoeing. We would like to briefly introduce wakeboarding here.

Water sports Wakeboarding – what is it?

When wakeboarding you stand on a board, similar to the well-known surfboard, only that the board here is shorter and wider and the feet are strapped. In your hands, you hold a pole to which a rope is attached and which pulls a motorboat or a cable car.

Wakeboarding is not dissimilar to surfing or water skiing, you could even consider it a mix of both. Snowboarding could also be considered a distant relative.

The great popularity of young water sports

The advantage of wakeboarding over surfing is that you are safer on the board and are not dependent on the wind. As a result, slower speeds are also possible, which makes the sport so popular, especially for water sports beginners.

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But the most important reasons to be able to enjoy the independence from the wind and thus the feeling of rapid gliding over the water at any time and above all that jumping to incredible heights are possible in this sport, made the popularity for the new water sports increase so rapidly after becoming known.

Where does wakeboarding come from?

Wakeboarding is one of the most popular water sports, even though this sport is still relatively young compared to many others. Today’s International Federation for Water skiing and wakeboarding (IWWF) has existed since 1946, but wakeboarding did not develop until the 1980s. The exact birth of wakeboarding is 1990.

Wakeboarding originally originated directly from surfing. American surfers from California were annoyed by constant winds and came up with the idea why you could not let yourself be pulled by a boat on the board.

Who invented wakeboarding?

The wakeboard inventor, on the other hand, is unknown. It’s not clear who invented wakeboarding. Probably at the same time, a group of surfers from the USA came up with the idea of simply being pulled by a boat.

However, the normal surfboards were much too long for this and so the first boards were invented that did not have much in common with today’s wakeboards, the so-called Skurfer. The skurfers were a mixture of water ski and surfboard, almost an oversized water ski and relatively heavy boards, difficult to handle and not so good to ride, only the professionals managed this.

It was not until 1990 that the wakeboard as we know it today was created. Herb O’Brien, the owner of a water ski brand, built the so-called Hypolite, which was the first prototype of a wakeboard. The Hyperlite was smaller and flatter than the Skurfer, making it easier to drive.

In the further course, the Hyperlite was further developed, for example, the symmetry of the board and the fins at both ends of the board, which provide more stability in the water. Wakeboards are therefore more like snowboards than surfboards, even if the idea originally emerged from them.

Wakeboarding history in the 20th and 21st centuries

The popularity of these new boards and sports rose so rapidly that Jimmy Redmon founded the WWA (World Wake Association) in Florida in 1990. And just two years later, wakeboarding has officially declared a sport when sports promoters founded the Wakeboard Pro Series, which continued to grow from year to year and spread throughout Europe as early as 1994.

Boat manufacturers and wakeboard accessories companies sponsored a number of events, which further increased the popularity and popularity and the sport became more and more extensive. However, there were no official rules yet, the first rule book came from Great Britain, including, for example, the water ski lift, also called cable, instead of the motorboat, which was supposed to standardize the roadway and create equal conditions for everyone.

Supply and demand for wakeboarding and all kinds of accessories continued to rise rapidly, so more and more water sports enthusiasts, for example, water skiers, from other areas were interested in wakeboarding and followed the further development with great interest and attention curiously.

In 1995, the first German wakeboard association was founded in Berlin. Within the International Ski Federation, a new student council, the European Wakeboard Association (EWA), was established in 1997. Even in 1997, the so-called Wake Attack Tour was started by Swatch and O ́Neil, whereby the sport continued to be known to a broad public.

The Wake Attack Tour was a complete success, the wakeboard community continued to grow at a rapid pace and so the German and European Wakeboard Association decided to hold contests, contests that still take place today, such as the German Wakeboard Tour, the European Wakeboard Tour, and the European Cable Wakeboard

The first World Cup in wakeboarding took place in Germany in 1998. At this World Cup, the rope was pulled by both the cable and the motorboat.

During the German Wakeboard Tour in 1999, the next big breakthrough came when over 45 television stations reported on wakeboarding and 110 reports were printed in magazines. From now on, wakeboarding was known even to those who hadn’t heard much about it and everyone was fascinated by the flexibility, the jumps, and the exhilarating feeling.

The first World Championships in wakeboarding were also held in Germany in 2001, in Duisburg, and wakeboarding was also represented at the World Games in 2005.

Future = Olympics?

Wakeboarding is also not far from being included in the Olympic Games, it was placed on the shortlist for the 2020 Olympic Games in 2011, which includes a selection of sports that could be introduced into the Olympic Games as a new discipline.

Let’s see where the path still leads because everything depends on the further course, but with the very good development so far, nothing can go wrong!