Dear Rider: The Jake Burton Story

Dear Rider, Universal's amazing snowboard documentary produced by Red Bull Media House, is a celebration of the life and vision of Jake Burton Carpenter (1954-2019), the pioneer who made snowboarding a global and cultural phenomenon.

Inspired by the "Snurfer", a surfboard-style wooden board, Jake created his first snowboard in 1977 as a cheap alternative to skiing. Since then, he has developed increasingly versatile boards, lobbied ski resorts to allow snowboarding, sponsored the world's best athletes, and faced more and more competition and pressure from the media, which called snowboarding "the worst new sport." By the late 1990s, Jake's vision catapulted snowboarding's punk culture into the mainstream - and eventually onto the world stage of the Olympics. 

Although Jake and the Burton brand enjoyed unprecedented success in the new century, he also had to battle two very serious health conditions: Miller Fisher Syndrome, a rare nerve disorder, and the cancer that would eventually take his life in 2019.

Culminating in the 2020 Burton US Open Snowboarding Championships, Burton's first event after Jake's death, Dear Rider is a graphic illustration of how one man's dreams combined with tenacity and grit can literally change the world.