While a footballer can make a perfectly good living (or if they’re Gareth Bale, a fucking fortune) from their salary, and even a middle-ranking tennis player can earn a decent amount from prize money, pro snowboarders are pretty much entirely dependent on sponsorship for their earnings.
For most pros this means getting paid to ride a particular company’s snowboard kit – a Burton board say, or Oakley outerwear. Endorsements like that make a lot of sense – the rider gets to use good stuff, and the brand gets photos and videos that make their kit look the dogs proverbials.
But not all sponsorship is so straightforward and over the years there have been a whole host of snowboard-related endorsement deals that made errr… less sense, shall we say. Here, in a list that’s kind of like those god-awful American TV Shows (“When Inmates/Crocodiles/Housewives Go Wild”), is a list of our favourite weird endorsement deals.