Skateboarding Can’t Have Its Olympic Sized Cake And Eat It, Too
The 2020 (2021?) Tokyo Olympics are finally underway, ending months of uncertainty about whether or not the games would actually occur. For the first time, skateboarding will be an official event, broken up into two parts, street and park competition. But what is the place for a subculture in an international theater? How does an activity so littered with outcasts make its way to the highest echelons of sporting competition? Skateboarding offers something for everyone, but only if you’re honest about what skateboarding is.
When you bring a subculture to an international competition, you’re not just representing your country but the subculture as a whole. The problem with the Olympics fundamentally misrepresents what Skateboarding is. There isn't a firm consensus within the skateboarding industry as to whether or not it's even a sport at all, so how can you compete in it at the highest level? What rules are there in skateboarding? What makes someone a better skater than someone else? How do you score style? There is no natural way to come up with a scoring system, the way there is for soccer, or for baseball, or for track, or any other sport. Skateboarding is entertainment mixed with athletics, but it’s not a sport, because there is no inherent competition to it.
Then there’s the issue of style. At its core, skateboarding is a very beautiful thing to watch, and at times, it ventures closer to an art form than a sport. The best skaters are fluid in movement, with a way of movement so fluid and effortless it makes every trick look easy. Skaters like Mark Suciu, Tyshawn Jones, Bobby Dekeyzer, all have a mesmerizing style, and despite being great skaters, typically underperform in competitions. Style doesn’t fit into contest scoring, and indeed it looks to be too subjective for the Olympics; the scoring system specifically mentions “degree of difficulty of the tricks, height, speed, originality, execution and the composition of moves, in order to award an overall mark.” The art is shunned in exchange for the jockish, machine-like impulses to shoehorn skateboarding into an activity loosely resembling “sports.” Uniforms, scoring systems, and designated park courses swallow the individuality and creativity that come from skateboarding’s lack of constraints.
My initial reaction to the inclusion in the Olympics was positive, especially when it looked like we might have a good number of the street contest skateboarders who are essential to the core of skateboarding, but like most things in skateboarding, my opinion of it worsened when I discovered Ishod Wair would not be partaking. Yuto Horigome (who will anchor Japan’s Olympic team) had just released his part The Yuto Show. Baggy jeans, grainy VX1000 footage, and a style that’s so relaxed it looks like he falls asleep midair with each trick; truly the best of skateboarding. I’ve had this hope that someone watches the Olympics and with their curiosity piqued, they Google Yuto and come across The Yuto Show. Or maybe they see Alexis Sablone, who with her Masters Degree in architecture from MIT, is one of the best ambassadors for what a professional skateboarder can be. But for every Yuto or Alexis, you also have Jake Illardi, or a Heimana Reynolds, who are largely invisible within the broader skateboarding community because they mainly occupy contest spaces, which cater to television deals and broader non skate-related audiences rather than the grittier, less glorious spaces of street video parts that dominate the larger imprint of skateboarding. Are these the best representatives for skateboarding?
Participation in the Olympics is a natural progression from letting multinational corporations like Nike, Adidas, Red Bull, or Monster to have a significant stake in the industry. Of the six male skaters representing Team USA, five have an energy drink sponsor, with the sixth (Heimana Reynolds) sponsored by Vitamin Water. And for the women’s section, only Alexis Sablone and Alana Smith lack corporate food and beverage sponsors (Although Sablone is also sponsored by Converse). Typically most professional skateboarders will have sponsors directly related to skateboarding — boards, shoes, wheels, trucks, hardware, apparel — but only the most sanitized, scrubbed, and marketable skaters possess the elusive blue chip sponsors most common among the big four American sports; the energy drinks, the fast food chains, the car companies.
A company that’s sole motivation is profit is going to make decisions to maximize their money, and the TV money from competitions is too good to turn away. With that comes some positives; some of that money does trickle down to the individual professional skater, and I can’t criticize someone in an industry as physically demanding as skateboarding for trying to maximize their lifetime earnings while they’re still physically able. But the more corporate skateboarding gets, the more dilute and desensitized the industry gets. How far are we from the Navy advertising in Thrasher, or the Army putting together a skate team like they did with esports? You have to fight corporatization early before the goal posts are moved far enough that it’s a small step to the military industrial complex.
Mounting Covid cases within Tokyo look like they’re going to derail the games, and indeed, public support for the Olympics is in the gutter, with Toyota pulling their ads (although interestingly, they sponsor Team USA Women’s Park skater Jordyn Barratt). The Olympics as a whole is in the midst of a PR meltdown, and the ratings are sure to lag. If it does, maybe it tanks the idea of skateboarding as an Olympic sport on its way out, but that’s nothing more than curing a symptom of a deep rooted monied interest.