She's a New Yorker, an artist and architect with a masters from MIT who grew up skating in Connecticut.
OLYMPIC SKATEBOARDING COMMENTATOR FREE
It's that free spirit that first attracted 34-year-old Olympian Alexis Sablone. It's the freedom, the love it brings us all together and the non-stop challenge and the progression." The sport moves from the street to the world stage "That goes for not only if you're one of us, about to skate the Olympics, or just a kid out there skating in a skate park, just having fun. "I love skateboarding because it's the funnest thing on Earth," he told friends and fans at the L.A. The tattooed 26-year-old from Laguna Beach, California is already the top-ranked, highest-paid skateboarder in the world. Among them was street skater Nyjah Huston. Park skaters will try to outdo each other's mid-air tricks on a course with steep slopes and deep valleys.īefore coming to Tokyo, Team USA skateboarders rode in formation past American flags in downtown Los Angeles. "But now the world will call us Olympians."Īt the Games, street skaters will compete on a course that includes stairs, handrails, curbs, ledges, and benches. "We used to see ourselves as a family of misfits," Hawk said in a promotional video. Now that day is here, and Hawk, now 53, is in Tokyo as an official Olympics commentator. He's always talked about how the Olympics need skateboarding to attract young fans. Skateboarding became popular around the world and Hawk turned his childhood hobby into a career. And it received a lot of negative labels: "It was a kid's fad, a waste of time, a dangerous pursuit, a crime," he recalled. Legendary skateboarder Tony Hawk told NPR in 2006 that skateboarding always had a bit of an outlaw street culture with a bad reputation. Skateboarders looking for off-limits locations would get stopped by police. The pioneering 1970s skateboard crew Zephyr, known as the "Z Boys" from Dogtown, boasted of sneaking into and draining backyard swimming pools to skate inside them. In fact, it was first known as "sidewalk surfing" - with kids on long wooden boards with metal wheels, riding on cement as though they were riding waves. "And all the kids would just come, and like it was their getaway."īack in the day, skateboarding was an offshoot of surfing, another sport making its Olympic debut. "They would build homemade ramps and just do sort of like hard-core shredding, and it was just their getaway," says Ruby Molina, whose family owns a nearby skate shop.
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