Airboarding

Submission 4,511

About

Airboarding is a social game in which people hang their hand out of a car window and hold a lightweight object at their fingertips against the wind and mimic the act of skateboarding.

Origin

While the game of airboarding likely existed offline, the earliest known iteration of the sport online was posted in a sketch by the comedy group The Bath Boys on September 8th, 2013. That day, they published a video parody of the trailer for the skateboarding biopic Lords of Dogtown entitled "AIRBOARDERS (Official Movie Trailer)" on YouTube. ^[1] The video mimics the beats and structure of a biopic about late-70s skateboarding pioneers and maps the act of hanging their hands out of a car window and "surfing" the wind with a business card on the tips of their fingers. The post (shown below) received more than 790,000 views in four and a half years.

[This video has been removed]

Spread

On March 11th, 2018, Twitter ^[2] @JeremyWiegman tweeted a video of a man airboarding with various items. The post (shown below, left) was captioned, "BET YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THIS BEFORE," and received more than 42,000 retweets, 114,000 likes and 1.9 million views in three days.

Following the initial tweet, people began sharing their airboarding videos, as well. On March 13th, Twitter^[3] user @keithpucarelli posted a video of a person airboarding with a candy wrapper. The post (shown below, right) received more than 145 retweets and 1,400 likes in 24 hours.

On March 13th, Twitter^[4] published a Moments page about the popularity of the videos.