Skateboarding Got Too Cool for the Games to Ignore

By Sam Blum, Senior writer @sammblum

The first Olympic Games were held in the ancient world, a long time before street tough adolescents in 1950s New York City tacked roller skates onto planks of wood and rode the first primitive skateboards. 

Now, young rippers are everywhere, and they're vying for Olympic glory by skating in Park and Street contests in the 2024 Paris Games. Team USA's Gavin Bottger is 17 years old and a reigning world champion, but he was outgunned by Australia's Keegan Palmer, 21, who won his second straight gold medal in Men's Park on Wednesday. Coco Yoshizawa, a 14-year-old whiz from Japan, dazzled earlier this week with a gold medal performance in Women's Street. 

There is also Andy MacDonald. An elder statesman at the age of 51, the Team Great Britain skater was born in the U.S. but opted to compete for his dad's homeland. MacDonald, who turned professional in 1994, is lovingly called "Uncle Andy" by his Olympic teammates. The other two skaters representing TGB are 16, and weren't even born when MacDonald began skating professionally. 

The yawning age gap between MacDonald and the rest of the field speaks to the long and circuitous path skateboarding took to gain entry into the Olympics. Previously the exclusive territory of gymnasts, swimmers, runners, and U.S. sporting icons like Michael Jordan and Carl Lewis, the Games are now a showcase of elite skateboarding. It's part of a growing focus on subcultural sports that are making Olympic inroads, including snowboarding, BMX, surfing, and breakdancing.

But skateboarding is in the Olympics because it became impossible for the International Olympic Committee to ignore the sport's cultural resonance and global popularity. The competition's governing body is constantly grappling with how to engage an increasingly distracted global audience. This year had been projected to attract a record low in viewership: Thirty-five percent of U.S. adults said they planned to watch "a great deal" of the Olympics, according to a recent Pew survey, down from 48 percent in 2016 and 59 percent in 2012. That turned out to be pessimistic: Viewership is up 79 percent from the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games, averaging 41.5 million daily viewers. 

Maybe skateboarding has something to do with it. "There's a saying that's been going around for some time, and I can't remember who said it, but [it's that] the Olympics needs skateboarding more than skateboarding needs the Olympics," Patrick Kigongo, a longtime skater and co-host of the Mostly Skateboarding podcast, explains to Inc. 

Some trace the quote back to the most famous skateboarder of all time, Tony Hawk: He told CNN in 2019 that including skateboarding would imbue the Games with a sorely lacking "cool factor" that sports like badminton and archery don't provide. 

Despite the hype, the broader skateboard industry is suffering a slump. It's not a result of skating's failure to mesmerize audiences, but rather a reflection of macroeconomic trends, Kigongo argues. "There is generally less money to go around. Interest rates are indeed higher. People are spending less," Kigongo says. "Companies are realizing that there's significantly less money in skateboarding than there was three or four years ago. [The Olympics are] not going to radically shift the way that the industry functions right now." 

After a pandemic boom when people had time on their hands to buy boards and head outside, the industry has been sputtering: Kigongo references Alltimers, a board maker that went out of business last month. Chad Muska, a skating icon turned entrepreneur, recently described how skate companies typically fare when downturns strike. "Within our skateboard industry, [companies] they grow, they grow, they grow, and as they're growing their infrastructure continuously grows. And if there's ever a downfall in sales ... they go out of business," Muska told The Nine Club podcast in June. 

It's true that many core skateboarders bristled, or at least rolled their eyes, at the sport's potential induction before its debut at the 2020 Tokyo Games. Skateboarding, after all, began as counterculture, and evolved in opposition to traditional sports, much like snowboarding did in skiing. Judging skateboarding like a gymnastics contest might as well be blasphemous to purists. Traditional street skateboarding, for example, won't take place in front of judges. It might also involve jumping over a fence, or evading security guards, as many fun places to skate are often on private property. 

"When we're talking about Olympic skateboarding, we're mostly talking about this tier of skateboarding that's really kind of detached from the whole rest of the industry and the rest of the world," Mike Burrill, editor and co-founder of the skateboarding publication Village Psychic, tells Inc.

But the sport's growth made skateboarding red meat for the Olympics as it seeks out a newer audience. Skating's appeal among young people is unshakable--and it has spread among skaters irrespective of their socioeconomic status or international borders. There are 88 competitors representing 23 nations in Olympic skateboarding in Paris. 

"You see the younger generations within skateboarding becoming a lot more diverse and a lot more inclusive," Burrill says. More people are going to tune into the Games to watch skateboarding and think "I see somebody who looks like me up there." 

Of course, skateboarding didn't rapidly wind up in the Olympic spotlight. "It started feeling inevitable probably about 10 years ago," says Kyle Beachy, a former English professor at Roosevelt University and author of the memoir The Most Fun Thing: Dispatches From a Skateboard Life. 

Major sporting brands have slowly crept into the space, edging it closer to the mainstream. Nike and Adidas were early movers, starting their skateboarding businesses in 2002 and 1998, respectively. Much of the athletic shoe market followed over the ensuing decades: New Balance jumped into the space in 2013 and Asics joined in 2020. Skate company logos are pretty ubiquitous across the cultural landscape. T-shirts bearing the logo of Thrasher magazine, often cited as the standard-bearer of the subculture, are a fashion statement for people who don't skate. 

All told, the industry is worth around $3.2 billion, according to Grand View Research. 

Both the skateboarding world and the Olympics hope to benefit from the sport's Paris debut. "The industry itself pretty clearly has a vested interest in reaching as many potential consumers as they can find ... [and] has always been hopeful for something like the Olympics to come along and present this whole windfall of sales," Beachy explains. 

After the Games conclude, the skate industry hopes that windfall will arrive. 

Photo: Getty Images.