On the Olympic Menu, Stalefish With a Side of Roast Beef

Feb. 4, 2014 10:52 p.m. ET

2014 Olympic organizers eager to draw younger TV viewers have added a new event–slopestyle. With separate ski and snowboard competitions, slopestyle athletes perform tricks on a mountainside course that resembles a snowy skate park.

When the Winter Olympics kick off Thursday in Sochi, you’ll see some McTwists, a bit of stalefish and plenty of fakie. Those are the names of moves in snowboarding, which might have the most colorful lexicon in sports.
But just as awesome as the sight of a rider somersaulting through the air is the truth of where many snowboarding terms came from: They are the decades-old offhand jokes of teenage skateboarders in Southern California.
Skateboarding’s golden age in the 1970s and ’80s drove the 1980s and ’90s boom of snowboarding, as many skaters spent their winters on the snow. Snowboarders simply adopted skating’s tricks and names.
Snowboarding became an Olympic sport in 1998 and has expanded to 10 events at these Games—five each for men and women—while skateboarding is still on the outside. But skateboarding’s legacy lives on at the Winter Games in the kooky monikers created by its sun-splashed pioneers.

“Had we known that anyone was going to care, we probably would have put more thought into it,” said Jeff Grosso, a veteran skateboarder known for a move called a “roast beef.” “We were just trying to make each other laugh.”
A famous name is the “stalefish,” when an airborne snowboarder grabs the heel edge of the board behind the back leg and between the bindings. The name was hatched at a mid-1980s skateboard camp in Sweden, when American skateboarding legend Tony Hawk wrote in his journal that a camp meal consisted of “stale fish.”
Another camper read the journal and asked if that was the name of the strange trick Mr. Hawk had been doing. Mr. Hawk said yes, and the name stuck.
Mr. Grosso was performing a modified version of the stalefish when a photo of him doing the trick appeared in the February 1990 issue of the skateboarding magazine Thrasher. Mr. Grosso guesses that the caption writer chose a description he deemed the opposite of a stale fish, saying he was “roast beefin’ it.” The “roast beef” is now a common snowboarding move.
Longtime pro skateboarder Lance Mountain recalled performing one move during a game of one-upsmanship years ago at a Southern California skate park. Mr. Mountain put his leading hand on the edge of the concrete bowl in which skateboarders often skated and held his board with his trailing hand, the opposite of the norm at the time.
The trick looked so awkward that fellow skateboarder Neil Blender called it an “egg-plant”—stinky as a rotten egg, Mr. Mountain recalled. The trick is a staple in online snowboard glossaries. Through Mr. Mountain, Mr. Blender declined an interview.
This year, Olympic organizers eager to draw younger TV viewers have added the event of slopestyle, which has separate ski and snowboard competitions. Slopestyle athletes perform tricks on a mountainside that resembles a snowy skate park, with obstacles for sliding on and jumps called “kickers.” Sochi’s course even includes that staple of skating culture, the stairway handrail.
Both snowboarding and skateboarding first flourished in off-limits areas—skateboarding in drained swimming pools, snowboarding in ski areas’ nooks and backcountry. The sports attracted mainstream sponsors and a wider following as they grew, but trick names still honor their pioneers.
Skateboarder Steve Caballero is known for the “Caballerial,” a 360-degree spin while riding backward. The trick surfaced last month in a question on “Jeopardy!” and has become a snowboarding staple as riders advance to double- and triple-Cabs.

Shaun White performed the Double McTwist 1260 at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. The trick built on the skateboarding move the ‘McTwist’ invented by Mike McGill. Sports Illustrated/Getty Images

At the Vancouver Olympics four years ago, snowboard superstar Shaun White ran away with the halfpipe gold medal by nailing a trick he called the Double McTwist 1260. The “McTwist” was a skateboard trick done in 1984 by Mike McGill, a member of the legendary Bones Brigade skateboarding team. “I was pretty humbled by hearing him say that,” Mr. McGill said.
There is no Oxford English Dictionary for skating or snowboarding terms, so the provenance of some is murky. Generally, tricks were named for or by the skaters who popularized them, but some are mysteries. The term “fakie,” for instance, means riding backward. It isn’t clear exactly where the name came from.
Some trick names are from a different era. The snowboard move called a “mute”—grabbing the board’s toe edge in front of the front foot—was named in the 1980s for Chris Weddle, a skateboarder who became known for doing it. Mr. Weddle is actually deaf, he explained, and might have preferred the trick be called the “Deaf Air” or the “Weddle.” But he is glad the move lives on at the Olympics, saying, “It makes me feel famous, you know?”
Oliver Kraus, a spokesman for the International Ski Federation, known as FIS, said the governing group compiles its trick list using everything from coaches’ consulting to Facebook and YouTube. That might explain how a trick called the “crippler” also landed in the group’s glossary. “FIS on such topics follows the trend of the sport and doesn’t set rules on names of tricks, or vet them,” Mr. Kraus said.
Although skateboarders led the way, snowboarders have created and named many of their own tricks. The Haakon Flip is named after Terje Haakonsen, the dominating Norwegian snowboarder who boycotted the inaugural Olympic qualifications in halfpipe in 1998 because the International Olympic Committee selected the ski federation to handle it rather than a snowboarders’ federation.
Through Facebook, Mr. Haakonsen declined to talk about trick names because he didn’t want to be associated “in any way” with the IOC.
The “Michalchuk” is a back flip with a ½ or 1½ spin named for Canadian snowboarder Mike Michalchuk, who did it in the late 1990s. “It’s cool to be able to have left something in the sport,” said Mr. Michalchuk, who still signs the occasional autograph. “It’s like my petrified footprint that I left for everyone else to uncover.”
Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com

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