Invenstor of Snowboarding passes away

RATM

RIP Tom, your invention has given a lot of us a lot of fun

http://www.independent.ie/sport/other-sports/man-who-inventing-snow-boarding-and-got-it-recognised-as-a-sport-dies-aged-61-3235163.html

TOM Sims, is widely credited with inventing the snowboard; he became a world champion at snowboarding and persuaded ski resorts to recognise it as a sport.

He was also a prominent manufacturer of snowboards and their precursor, the skateboard . Sims was already a skilled exponent of the skateboard when in 1963, aged 12, he built a crude “ski board” in his school woodwork class to continue riding during the winter.

“That’s what led me to build the first snowboard: not being able to skateboard on an icy street,” he explained . “So after that, it was just 12 months a year of boarding, whether it be skateboarding, snowboarding or surfing.”

While his youthful invention had its limitations, he continued to finesse the design. In the meantime he developed a parallel career as a designer of skateboards.

Sims realised that many ski resorts looked askance at snowboarding, regarding it as a passing fad, and some banned it altogether. But the sport was gathering support, particularly with the arrival of ski-style slalom races, which suited Sims’s innovative, aggressive skateboarding style.

He also helped to introduce freestyle snowboarding, using natural and artificial obstacles such as the semicircular “half-pipe”, made of snow, which requires competitors to perform tricks on their way down the slopes.

Thomas Paul Sims was born on December 6 1950 in Los Angeles, but when he was two his family moved to the East Coast, settling at Haddonfield, New Jersey. When the family returned to California on a visit in 1960, Tom saw other children skateboarding in the street and begged his father to buy him his own board.

In 1971 Sims drove from his home in New Jersey across the United States to California, where he embraced the surfing culture, riding in professional competitions on boards he had made himself.

He set up his own company, Sims Skateboards, in 1976, and became the first to introduce longboarding (cruising the streets on a skateboard more than 4ft long). These outsized boards became Sims’s speciality. “He liked taking this surf kind of feeling and putting it out there on skateboards,” noted one industry observer.

In the 1980s Sims diversified into snowboards, pioneering models with metal rims which made for a smoother and more stable ride. His new company, Sims Snowboards, was also the first to design boards specially for women; they were lighter, shorter and narrower, to fit smaller boots.

In the meantime Sims himself had emerged as one of America’s most accomplished exponents of snowboarding, becoming a world champion in 1983. Two years later he was sought out by Hollywood to become Roger Moore’s uncredited stunt double during a snowboard sequence in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985).

“Prior to 1985 I had to beg a ski area owner to let me on their precious chairlifts,” Sims declared in 1995. “That same guy that kicked me off the hill 10 years ago now begs me for a board for his grandson.”

Snowboarders are now a familiar sight at most ski resorts, and snowboarding was finally officially recognised as a Winter Olympic sport in 1998.

Tom Sims, who died of a heart attack, is survived by his wife, Hilary, two sons, a daughter and two stepdaughters.

Tom Sims, born December 6 1950, died September 12 2012