widely accepted that Jake Burton Carpenter (founder of Burton Snowboards) and/or Tom Sims (founder of Sims Snowboards) invented modern snowboarding by introducing bindings and steel edges to snowboards in the late 1970s. Sims was an avid skateboarder in 1963 when he built a crude “ski board” in his seventh-grade wood shop class in Haddonfield, N.J., so he could continue to ride during the winter. Snowboarding began to spread internationally. In 1981, a couple of Winterstick team riders went to France at the invitation of Alain Gaimard, marketing director at Les Arcs. After seeing an early film of this event, French skiers/surfers Augustin Coppey, Olivier Lehaneur, Olivier Roland and Antoine Yarmola made their first successful attempts during the winter of 1983 in France (Val Thorens), using primitive, home-made clones of the Winterstick. Starting with pure powder, skateboard-shaped wooden-boards equipped with aluminium fins, foot-straps and leashes, their technology evolved within a few years to pressed wood/fiber composite boards fitted with polyethylene soles, steel edges and modified ski boot shells. These were more suitable for the mixed conditions encountered while snowboarding mainly off-piste, but having to get back to ski lifts on packed snow. In 1985, James Bond popularized snowboarding in the movie A View to a Kill. In the scene, he escapes Soviet agents who are on skis with a makeshift snowboard made from the debris of a snowmobile that exploded. The actual snowboard used for the stunt was a Sims snowboard ridden by founder Tom Sims. By 1986, although still very much a minority sport, commercial snowboards had started appearing in French ski resorts. Contemporaneously, the Snurfer was being turned into a snowboard on the other side of the iron curtain. In 1980, Aleksey Ostatnigrosh and Alexei Melnikov - two members of the only Snurfer club in the Soviet Union started changing the Snurfer design to allow jumping and to improve control on hard packed snow. Apparently unaware of developments in the Snurfer/snowboard world, they attached a bungee cord to the Snurfer tail which the rider could grab before jumping. Later, in 1982, they attached a foot binding to the Snurfer. The binding was only for the back foot, and had a release capability. In 1985, after several iterations of the Snurfer binding system, Aleksey Ostatnigrosh made the first Russian snowboard. The board was cut out of a single vinyl plastic sheet and had no metal edges. The bindings were attached