Skateboarding’s Moment in History
The host country dominated street skating’s first foray in the Olympics.
With the completion of the men’s and women’s street skating events at the Tokyo games over the weekend, skateboarding had its Olympic debut. It was a beautiful sight to see these world-class skaters shred the course and showcase street skateboarding on an international stage. California Skateparks, the legendary skatepark design and build firm, also got to show off their talent to the world with another masterfully designed park that allowed the skaters to be creative and put together some gnarly lines. I loved it—the event, the park— and I hope that the IOC includes skateboarding as part of the 2024 schedule of events and beyond. This was a historic moment for skateboarding as a sport, and I think it should be celebrated by skaters and fans.
Some folks don’t see it that way, and I get it. Taking the way-back machine to the mid-90s when skateboarding debuted in the X-Games, I remember feeling pretty bummed that my counter-culture hobby, something I considered more of a way of life than a sport, was getting that type of exposure. I liked the idea of keeping it underground, but it would soon become a commercial phenomenon. After Tony Hawk stuck his 900 during the 1999 Summer X-Games, and his Pro Skater dropped on PlayStation, every little suburban rug rat was riding off curbs on their Nash complete, fresh off the department store rack. I was furious. I was also 17 and lacked the big picture vision. Back then, I was worried that skating had gone corporate, and it would change my relationship with skating.
Well, skateboarding did go corporate, with a few other extreme sports, in the early 2000s. Activision dropped a couple more Pro Skater sequels (I bought 2 and 3. They were dope.). Beverage and snack companies, like Mt. Dew and Doritos, were smacking consumers across the face with their “extreme” product branding. Jackass was a thing, and it was pretty damn funny even though it gave a lot of people the impression that this was how skaters behaved. I mean, they were spot on in some cases. The X-Games are still around, and an even better skateboarding contest, Street League, was born out of that corporate desire to make a buck off skating, and to give the best in the game a stage to showcase their talent. That happened thanks to Rob & Big and Fantasy Factory and the platform two successful shows on MTV provided Rob Dyrdek. If none of this happens, all the way back to the X-Games 900, social media would have eventually made skateboarding and skaters marketable, and corporations would have gotten their hands on the brand, one way or another. It was inevitable, but we might not have seen skateboarding at all in these Olympics. That would have been a shame. I was pulling for the American skaters, but it was cool to see Yuto Horigome, Mimiji Nishiya, and Fuma Nakayama represent the host country on the podium.
The commercialization hasn’t changed what is skateboarding at its core, a hobby that is as fun as it is frustrating. It didn’t affect my relationship with skateboarding back in the day, and it won’t affect how individual skaters relate to skateboarding now. The fact still remains that very few things you experience in life will beat the feeling of landing a trick that’s been kicking your ass. If anything, the commercial appeal of skateboarding has led to another phase of skate culture’s progression. There are more skateparks now around the world than there were 20 years ago, which has given kids access to some sick, legal skate spots, and these little bastards have become really good at skateboarding, at younger ages than before.
If table tennis and badminton and horse dressage can have their spots in the Olympics, so can skateboarding, and for that matter surfing, too. I think this will pave the way for new parks in places where skateboarding has been looked at as the thing that burnouts do for fun, which is also true about golf and bowling. Have you ever seen John Daly or The Big Lebowski? For the most hardcore skaters in their prime or the long-time skater purists, skateboarding in the Olympics will not change a thing about the way you skate or your relationship with skate culture and the lifestyle. What makes skateboarding so great, the creativity and individual expression, will always be there because you folks will always exist. However, now the world you know so well can expand to include other kids, like you, who are looking for a hobby or for a community in which they can belong.
I’m old. I can and still ride on my skateboard around the neighborhood with my kids. I can still ollie and bust a kickflip, but that’s about it for the trick repertoire. I’m low-key scared to try anything else because I feel like my body would shatter if I hit the ground. I only recognized a couple of names on the men’s and women’s side of Olympic street skating, but it was fun to watch the youngsters rip that course. I’m stoked to watch the park competitions next week, and I hope that this is the beginning of a long future of skateboarding competitions being featured in the Olympics. At least keep it going through LA 2028 when we’ll (hopefully) be able to have some fans in the stands, so I can watch the skaters rip it up.
