Famous Snowboard From 1985 Bond Movie Appears in Colorado Museum

The Bond movie franchise has provided many memory moments in skiing, Roger Moore’s stunt double skiing off a cliff and opening a Union Jack parachute in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me, Daniel  Craig driving a planes across the slopes in the Tirol for 2015’s Spectre or the spectacular ski scenes filmed around Murren in 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to name but a few.

They’ve led to ski resorts capitalising on the association for, in some cases, decades afterwards. There’s a 007 ski run at Peyragudes in the French Pyrenees where the opening scenes of 1995 film  Golden Eye were shot, a whole Bond audio-visual visitor at Solden and even Bond-themed toilets at Mürren.

But one scene that is regarded as particularly significant in snow sports more widely was in 1985’s ‘A View To A Kill’ when Moore apparently takes one of the front sleds on a destroyed snowmobile and starts to snowboard on it, immediately looking much cooler than his pursuing skiers. The scene is popularly regarded as the first-time snowboarding appeared in a mainstream film and credited with helping to popularise the then-young sport.

The people stunt doubling for Roger Moore doing the stunt riding is a very famous name in the early decades of snowboarding, Tom Sims, and another rider, Steve Link, who took on the big airs. The scenes were filmed near the Diavolezza ski area, close to St Moritz in Switzerland.

Sims’ family donated the board recently to the Colorado Snowsports Museum in Vail, who are running an exhibition focused on the snowboarding pioneer. Sims had been snowboarding world champion in 1983 and set up his own snowboard manufacturing company, he died in 2012.

Vail first allowed boarders on its slopes in 1989, four years after the film was released.