Off the Chain: An Insiders History of Snowboarding

Off the Chain—boarder slang for extreme, wild, radical—takes readers on a wild ride through the rise of snowboarding, from its hippie beginnings to its present incarnation as a $150-billion global industry. Acerbic, opinionated, and witty, the book is narrated by Ross Rebagliati, the most famous and infamous name in the sport, and heavily illustrated with evocative photos from the past and present.

Through Rebagliati's racing career, we see snowboarding in its infancy, when its first practitioners constructed their own boards and snuck onto ski hills in order to ride. We meet the sport's most notorious figures and delve into the nature of snowboarding culture, with all the drugs, partying, groupies, and backstabbing it entails, and hear about the rapid development and improvement of equipment and what it's like to be a young athlete on the road.

Rebagliati also relates the most controversial event in the history of snowboarding—his Olympic win and subsequent loss, then regaining, of the gold medal due to a scandal that ended his career and brought snowboarding into the mainstream.

Finally, Rebagliati looks at the directions snowboarding has taken since his win: the mainstreaming of the sport, the evolution of snowboard fashion, and Shaun White's emergence as snowboarding's first megastar.