When first invented in Australia in the 1980s, wakeboarding was originally named skurfing and used bindingless hand-shaped boards designed specifically for towing. Nowadays, skurfing has died off in the advent of wakeboarding, which uses bindings.

Wakeboarding now has numerous different offshoots and styles, including kneeboarding and wakeskating.

It’s been claimed over the years that wakeboarding originated in a variety of different places.

The most widely accepted origin is in Australia in the 1980s when a skurfing board was given to a man called Jeff Darby.  Darby and his friends set about shaping their own skurfing boards, specifically designed to be towed behind boats. They ended up setting up their own trademarked company called Skurfer, selling these boards.

Around the same time in Florida however, a surfer named Howard Jacobs was surfing his smaller surfboards behind motorboats, adding  foot straps and pads on the board to attempt tricks impossible on a normal surfboard.

By the mid eighties there were two notable brands selling wakeboards. Darby joined forces with surfboard shaper and inventor Bruce McKee to create the ‘Mcski’ board, later renamed the ‘Wake-snake.’ Bruce McKee and associate Mitchell Ross on the other hand created the ‘Surf-Ski’ board and launched it at the 1984 at Chicago’s IMTEC show.

Wakeboarding was added as a competitive sport in the X Games II. The World Skiboard Association has now been re-named the World Wakeboard Association (WWA).