Skateboarding
Take an intimate look at some of the notable events from the history of skateboarding and find out how it got to where it is today.
01
What is skateboarding?
From the 1950s to the present day, skateboarding has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry impacting millions of lives across the world as an art form and a sport. In its history, skateboarding has inaugurated its own museums, awarded its own hall of fame and curated a self-documented history, cementing a special place in the heart of freedom culture.
The launch ramp of 1950s California lit the torch of skateboarding to be handed on to each new generation over the coming eras. In these decades, skateboarding transcended through ups and downs of economic prosperity and mainstream popularity, as different faces and figures basked in the spotlight or dominated the back alleys of urban performance.
Between the youth of the world and those ageing skateboarders who've watched it grow and change, the question of 'What is skateboarding?' has undergone a metamorphosis with each passing of the baton. While we do our best to answer this question again, we take our first push into a larger world. A world defined by the ultimate expression of freedom, movement and an intimate look at the history of skateboarding.
Make sure you know your ABC:
02
Origins: it's all downhill from here
The origin of the skateboard is as ambiguous as the origin of our universe. There are multiple reports from self-proclaimed skate-historians of who, what and where the first skateboards appeared. It's largely agreed upon that skateboards originated in the USA, first as crates of wood with roller-derby skates attached to the underside. The earliest models had handlebars attached, like modern scooters, but eventually the boxes were replaced by wooden planks and the handlebars were scrapped for an experience more akin to surfing. These scooter-boxes were seen as far back as the late 1800s, but it wasn't until the 1950s that wooden pallets with clay wheels were popularised on the downhill slopes of Southern California.
Before commercial skateboards began appearing in 1959, the only way you could skate was by making your own board. These homemade skateboards would seed the DIY mentality ingrained in skateboarding today. In a raw and beautiful way, skateboarding began not from an industry, but from the intense desire for one's own self-expression. Understanding this simple yet profound truth is our first glimpse into 'What is skateboarding?' and ultimately, what it means to be a skateboarder.
03
Skateboarding's first contests
It's difficult to imagine ourselves in the 1950s or 1970s DogTown eras – the birthplace of skateboarding. It would be even more difficult to imagine how much skateboarding would change since its conception. In the early 1960s, skateboard companies like Hobie and Makaha began advertising skating as 'sidewalk surfing' or an alternative to surfing when the waves were flat. By 1963, Makaha formed the first professional skateboarding team, competing in the first-ever skateboard competition later that year in Hermosa, California. While the remnants of early 1960s downhill skateboarding competitions take the form of death-defying modern-day San Francisco hill bombs, the freestyle competition formats and most tricks performed at the Hermosa competition are now but a distant memory to contemporary skateboarding.
Even with its novelty in American sports, skateboarding popularity ultimately crashed by 1965. People were more likely to go to a roller derby competition than a skateboarding competition. Skateboarding in the media began advertising skating as a dangerous activity, while the clay wheels and handstands grew as tiresome as watching a hula-hooper for hours on end. To understand how skateboarding nearly perished is to understand ultimately why its earliest forms are no longer seen. But, more importantly, comparing where skateboarding is today from these times, we see one of the greatest transformations of a sport in the 20th to 21st century.
04
Reinventing the wheel / first skateparks
Not figuratively, but literally. The skateboard wheel was reinvented by Frank Nasworthy, who introduced the urethane wheel to skateboarding in 1973. The new wheel, replacing the clunky clay wheels of the 1950s and 1960s, gripped the asphalt and pool walls like cleats on the grass. With the invention of the kick-tail alongside it, (a raised back end of the skateboard), a new definition of a professional skateboard was born. Skateboarding magazines sold at the local surf shop now had a horse to promote as a new craze of skateboarding began to expand worldwide. Just three years after the new skateboard wheel, the first skatepark sprouted in Florida in 1976.
Before the end of the decade, skateparks began to appear throughout North and South America, and soon after across Europe and Asia. Skateboarding's 1970s rise to mainstream culture was best popularised by the 2005 film Lords of Dogtown. In 1975, as seen in the film, the Zephyr skateboarding team spearheaded by Tony Alva showed the world skateboarding's potential at the Ocean Festival in Del Mar, California. This moment in skateboarding history serves as a cornerstone for its history and how skateboarding competitions would change in the coming decades.
However, skateboarding would ultimately suffer another near-fatal crash at the approach of the 1980s. As dubious corporations from outside skateboarding began to infiltrate its competitions with trojan horse contracts and over-saturation of contests, skateboarding's popularity fizzled out to a hermetic group of freedom seekers who prevailed in the empty backyard pools of America. Skateparks were no longer being constructed, as sky-rocketing insurance costs due to the injury-prone nature of skating. And so, no longer accepted by SoCal parents or corporations seeking the next great fad, skating became the calling card of anti-establishment culture and the growing punk scene of the 1980s.
05
Tony Hawk sends it from 0 to 900
What Zephyr Skateboards did that year in Del Mar for the world of skateboarding wouldn't be seen again until Tony Hawk landed his 900 in the 1999 X-Games. On June 27, 1999, Hawk dropped in at the Summer X-Games vert ramp for the 11th time to land the most recognisable trick in skateboarding history. At the time, no skateboarder could fathom just how much Hawk's two-and-a-half rotations would catapult skating into a new orbit of popularity. But by the time Hawk had officially brought professional skateboarding to the mainstream spotlight again, skateboarding had already undergone an immense transformation throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
Most skateboarders and non-skaters alike will attest to the significance of Tony Hawk's 900. But most non-skaters have no idea how important the 1980s and 1990s really were for skateboarding. In that time, street skateboarding was crafted by society's outcasts. The blueprints for professional street skating were drawn and everything we've come to know about skateboarding media claimed their niches in the skate world.
With the help of a new skateboard designed for aerial manoeuvres, Rodney Mullen had invented several flip tricks by the 1980s, after Curt Lindgren invented the Kickflip in 1978. The first street-only skateboarders Natas Kaupas and Mark 'The Gonz' Gonzales raised the bar once again by Boardsliding the first handrails. Skateboarding evolved from the backyards of ramp builders into the parking lots of grocery stores riddled with red curbs.
With the mainstream media turning a blind eye to skateboarding, skateboarders were given the chance to document their own culture through their own lens. This allowed skateboarders to wield the powers of producing their own media culture, combating the exact reasons why skateboarding had endured two major crashes in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1980s.
With skateboarders fully in control of the means of production of skate culture, the golden era of street skateboarding blossomed in the years 1993-2006. We saw in these years the rise of Shorty's and Chad Muska, videos like Mouse and Yeah Right! by Girl Skateboards, prominent international skate-teams like FLIP Skateboards, the celebrated LOVE Park era and the THPS video games franchise, as skateparks became synonymous with public park planning.
06
The trick heard around the world
As skateboarding evolved in the post Hawk era, skateboarding's interaction with society changed. Skateboarding deepened its roots in street skateboarding, as the definition of being a professional skateboarder shifted from competitive skating to video parts, while mainstream skate culture saw itself in novel forms of entertainment. Bam Margera would go on to parody a pro-skateboarder career with a reality television show, Viva La Bam. As companies entered the fold, skateboarding gained more recognition and skating’s elite began making palpable salaries.
Today, skateboarding has taken another quantum leap in its journey from faddish pastime to becoming the most culturally-influential boardsport of the modern era. Skateboarding's arrival on the biggest sporting platform on earth at Tokyo 2020 not only caused another worldwide wave of interest in the activity but kick-started the World Skateboarding Tour, which serves as the qualification series on the road to Paris 2024. At each stop (including Argentina, Italy, UAE, Switzerland and Japan) skaters from more than 50 countries around the globe vie for those all-important ranking points to ensure they are in with a chance of being on that podium when Paris welcomes the world and superstardom beckons.
What to know what tunes pro skater Zion Wright can't live without? Check out his Skate Noise playlist on Spotify:
.png)
