Wakeboarding: The Evolution of a Watersport

Now one the fastest-growing watersports in the United States, wakeboarding and wake surfing have evolved from their grass-roots beginnings into a worldwide phenomenon. Surfing has long been the favorite sport of beachgoers, and for decades surfers have experimented with riding their boards while being towed with a ski rope behind a boat, or even from a truck driving along the shoreline. Eventually, these pioneering watermen developed shorter boards that were more suited to the task, creating a sort of ancestor to modern wakeboarding. In the mid 1980s, a San Diego surfer named Tony Finn created and began marketing a new device called a Skurfer, which was a hybrid water-ski surfboard. The Skurfer allowed the rider to perform surf-style carving moves on the wake while being pulled by a boat. Significantly, the Skurfer had no straps or bindings, and looked much like a small surfboard.

In the summer of 1985, Finn added straps to the Skurfer. At around the same time, a Texan named Jimmy Redmon added straps to his Redline design water-ski board, a popular alternative to the Skurfer in that part of the country. With the introduction of foot-straps, wakeboarding as we know it was born. This critical additions allowed riders to catch big air, changing the riding style into something that looked more like snowboarding than surfing. Suddenly there was a new, free-flowing and dynamic watersport that was more than the sum of its surfing and waterskiing parts.

The name skiboarding remained popular for several more years as Tony Finn promoted and popularized the Skurfer. But the sport struggled to break into the mainstream, in part due to its great difficulty. Lack of technological innovation in board design meant that only very strong and experienced riders could pull off deepwater starts on the narrow yet buoyant Skurfer. Meanwhile, Redline boards of the era lacked durability. Even as the first Skurfer championships were televised by ESPN in 1990, the sport seemed to have reached a plateau.

Then everything changed when a watersports businessman named Herb O’Brien invented the Hyperlite, the first compression-molded neutral-buoyancy wakeboard. The innovation of neutral buoyancy made deepwater starts much easier, opening up the sport to just about anyone, from kids to old-timers. Following the success of the Hyperlite, other board began designing wakeboards, and the sport took off.

Body Glove is so happy to be a part of this great sport and have the best now assembled the best wakeboard team in the entire world.  Led by Rusty Malinoski, Bob Soven and Harley Clifford the Body Glove Wakeboard Team has been dominating the wakeboard world across the globe while looking good and performing in their Body Glove PFDs.