The summer before freshman year was liminal; I was trapped between realities, one left behind and one not yet arrived. Disconnected and without purpose, I found myself busting out my skateboard. Despite the heat and humidity, I put on heavy jeans and a hoodie (having learned a lesson from a previous wipeout) and found solace under flickering streetlights and suburban asphalt. Something about swerving down the pavement — wind snapping at my hair and eyes, music playing through crackling earbuds, wheels hissing on the pavement — brought an invigorating respite from uncertainty.
Despite enjoying skateboarding, I was not particularly interested in its Olympic scene. I did watch a few highlight clips, marveling at the fluidity of the athlete’s movements and their technical prowess, but the event felt disconnected from what had drawn me to skating in the first place: a $30 board and extra energy to burn.
Skateboarding, originally “sidewalk surfing,” arose in the 1950s along the California coast as a way for surfers to kill time when there were no waves. Countless variations of skateboarding eventually evolved, from longboard dancing to street and vert skateboarding. The board is simple, just a piece of plywood with wheels, yet the variety of tricks that can be performed are incredible. Without any initial “rules” or officiality to the sport, a punk counterculture of creativity and camaraderie arose alongside skating itself.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Cole Rowden, one of the founders of Michigan State Skate Club described the inevitability to skateboarding’s rise in the sports world.
“Skateboarding has been shunned in the sports world… it grew naturally in the way that society pushed it,” Rowden said.
Athletes had to find ways to build the sport apart from typical sponsorships, endorsements and mainstream recognition. So, it was built through culture and community. Rowden decided to start a club to foster a community for people to skate together. And it grew fast.
“When we started it was like 5 people and now we’re up to … 400 members and 200 very active people,” he said. He attributed this growth — the appeal of skating — to the culture and the thrill of learning such a difficult skill.
For all of the backlash skateboarding has received today, Rowden is correct: Skateboarding truly is a difficult skill, finally earning its spot, and respect, in 2021 at the Tokyo Olympic games. The upcoming Paris 2024 games are also set to host skateboarding as an official event.
“I feel like it’s kinda weird it is being added to the Olympics just now, it should have been 10 years ago,” Rowden said, referencing the dramatic impact skating has had on urban culture, fashion and music. It feels like the real world is just now catching up, finally recognizing skateboarding’s legitimacy.
There are two main disciplines within the skateboarding Olympic event: street and park. These mainly differ in the course setup, with the street discipline mimicking an urban environment with rails and stairs; the park course being a bowl-shaped structure with drops and curves. Athletes complete tricks in 45 second runs and are judged on, among other categories, difficulty, execution, flow and originality. The best run is counted as their final score.
In any skating competition, but especially in the high stakes of the Olympics, competitors need to consider strategy just as much as technical skill. In such a setting, it might be more beneficial to perfectly execute a simple trick than to make a minor mistake on a difficult one. Some skaters see this as antithetical to the spirit of skating, such as the organizers of “Live at the Olympic Stadium,” who aim to preserve the essence of skate culture in a competitive and community-centered environment. It does not give out prizes or medals, so skaters are encouraged to demonstrate their abilities in ways which could hinder them in Olympic-level competitions. Here, challenges are designed to be fun and flexible, and the atmosphere is casual but enthusiastic. Its core audience is fellow skaters, huddled close as their friends fly over picnic tables, weave through styrofoam cutouts and whizz down stairs.
“We’re trying to one-up ourselves, not the people around us,” said Rowden, drawing a distinction between his personal skating and competition. “(In a competition) you know the geometry of whatever you’re skating is perfect.”
In a casual environment, for example, you might want to grind a rail that, because of specific architecture, is only accessible from a tricky angle. The ground is uneven, there are passerbys. The stakes are simultaneously negligible and all-encompassing: you just need to prove to yourself that you can do it. In a competition, these complexities and extra factors are removed; There is nothing in the athlete’s way except themselves.
There is clearly a line between competition and street skating, and this division is exacerbated by its addition to the Olympics.
“I’m glad it was put into the Olympics for the riders’ sakes,” Rowden said. “It’s not keeping it so isolated in the extreme sports scene.”
The global stage of the Olympics means skating will be introduced to a new audience, ready to accept its legitimacy as a sport when the general attitude toward skateboarding can still be quite negative. Its addition may also undermine its counter-culture roots. Rowden is not afraid of the competition side of skating taking over the culture, however.
“The structural integrity of the culture will stay solid,” he said. “I think overall, it’s a good thing that it’s becoming more mainstream … It’s always been a sport, but hasn’t always been viewed that way… I don’t think that (the Olympics) should be the most important thing at the end of the day.”
Skating is extremely technical; I realized this when I had my first big wipeout. I had ridden my board to the crest of a suburban hill, gently pushed off and almost instantly succumbed to the dreaded speed wobble. A few seconds took a lifetimes to pass until I finally spilled onto the concrete; my forearms, knees and palms were battered, raw and pulsing. I was months into learning and didn’t even have the ability to cruise down a slope.
“The Olympics definitely help people realize it’s an art form like other sports. It’s kind of hard to see from the outside. It looks super easy,” Rowden said. Seeing Olympic winners getting a “face full of concrete” makes you realize skateboarding deserves its place in the extreme sport world.
However, Tristan Funkhouser, an internet skating personality and competitor in “Live at the Olympic Stadium,” thinks Olympic skating is “not natural.”
“Skateboarding is more art than it is a sport,” he said.
The freedom to express yourself through your board, leaving expectations behind, is something that skateboarders don’t take for granted. In the Olympics, you’re performing for people. In the comfort of your own park, there’s no one there to judge you but yourself.
“Outside of (formal) competitions you have a lot more creativity,” Rowden said.
Although athletes in the Olympics can make personal statements in their style choices and creative flourishes to their trick selection, they are quite confined. Rowden threw out the idea of adding music to the Olympic event — mimicking figure-skating and gymnastics routines — inspired by the proliferation of video parts. But the formal environment of the Olympics still distinctly alters the sport.
“(People) don’t find the attributes of a skater they like in a competition, but more in their day-to-day skating,” Rowden said, “It should be skateboarders making themselves stand out and not the podium.”
This differs from other sports, which are often defined by the athlete’s performances in the Olympics — think Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky or Usain Bolt. This is not the case for the skating world, which reveals a recurring preference for art and culture over sport.
Skateboarding’s inclusion in the Olympics may be a step towards mainstream recognition, but the essence of skating remains in its raw, unconstrained form. The formal environment of the Olympics is in stark contrast with the casual, self-driven nature of street skating, where skaters seek personal fulfillment rather than external validation. While the Olympics may introduce skateboarding to a broader audience, it is the unstructured, passionate and community-driven aspects of the sport that will continue to define its essence — where the tricks landed are personal victories, slams are communally celebrated as successes in progress and wheels sing along the asphalt.
Statement Columnist Eleanor Barrett can be reached at egbarr@umich.edu.
The post Streets to stadiums: Skateboarding on the Olympic stage appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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