Skateboarding

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Skateboarders in Beijing, China.

Skateboarding is the act of riding on and performing tricks with a skateboard. A person who skateboards is referred to as a skateboarder, skater, wood pusher or "shredder".

Skateboarding is a recreational activity, a job, or a method of transportation.^[1] Skateboarding has been shaped and influenced by many skateboarders throughout the years. A 2002 report by American Sports Data found that there were 18.5 million skateboarders in the world. Eighty-five percent of skateboarders polled who had used a board in the last year were under the age of 18, and 74 percent were male.^[2]

Skateboarding is relatively modern. A key skateboarding trick, the ollie, in which the skateboarder slams the tail side of the board and moves his front foot towards the nose, creating a lift off of the ground, was only developed in the late 1970s. This ollie was used only on vertical ramps on flat ground. A decade later, freestyle skateboarder Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip which before was called a Magic Flip.^[3]

[edit] History

[edit] The first skateboard

Skateboarding probably started in the 1950s or 1960s, when surfers in California got the idea of trying to surf the streets.^{[citation needed]} No one really knows who made the first board -- instead, it seems that several people came up with similar ideas at the same time. Several people have claimed to have invented the skateboard first, but nothing can be proved, and skateboarding remains a strange spontaneous creation. These first skateboarders started with wooden boxes or boards with roller skate wheels attached to the bottom. The boxes turned into planks, and eventually companies were producing decks of pressed layers of wood -- similar to the skateboard decks of today. During this time, skateboarding was seen as something to do for fun after surfing.

A skateboarder in Nice, France.

The first manufactured skateboards were ordered by a Los Angeles, California surf shop, meant to be used by surfers when the ocean was flat. The shop owner, Bill Richard and Kyler made a deal with the Chicago Roller Skate Company to produce sets of skate wheels, which they attached to square wooden boards. Accordingly, skateboarding was originally denoted "sidewalk surfing" and early skaters emulated surfing style and moves. Crate scooters preceded skateboards, and were borne of a similar concept, with the exception of having a wooden crate attached to the nose (front of the board), which formed rudimentary handlebars.^[4]

A number of surfing manufacturers such as Makaha started building skateboards that resembled small surfboards, and assembling teams to promote their products. The popularity of skateboarding at this time spawned a national magazine, Skateboarder Magazine, and the 1965 international championships were broadcast on national television. The growth of the sport during this period can also be seen in sales figures for Makaha, which quoted $10 million worth of board sales between 1963 and 1965 (Weyland, 2002:28). Yet by 1966 the sales had dropped significantly (ibid) and Skateboarder Magazine had stopped publication. The popularity of skateboarding dropped and remained low until the early 1970s. ^[4][5]

[edit] Second generation

In the early 1970s, Frank Nasworthy started to develop a skateboard wheel made of polyurethane, calling it the 'Cadillac' as he hoped this would convey the fat ride it afforded the rider.^[4] The improvement in traction and performance was so immense that from the wheel's release in 1974 the popularity of skateboarding started to rise rapidly again, and companies wanted to invest more in product development. Many companies started to manufacture trucks (axles) especially designed for skateboarding, and the modern design was reached in 1976 by Tracker Trucks. As the equipment became more maneuverable, the decks started to get wider, reaching widths of 10 inches (250 mm) and over in the end, thus giving the skateboarder even more control. Banana board is a term used to describe skateboards made of polypropylene that were skinny, flexible, with ribs on the underside for structural support and very popular during the mid-1970s. They were available in myriad colors, bright yellow probably being the most memorable, hence the name.

Manufacturers started to experiment with more exotic composites and metals, like fiberglass and aluminium, but the common skateboards were made of maple plywood. The skateboarders took advantage of the improved handling of their skateboards and started inventing new tricks. Skateboarders, most notably Ty Page, Bruce Logan, Bobby Piercy, Jared Phillips, Kevin Reed, and the Z-Boys (called Z-boys because of their local Zephyr surf shop) started to skate the vertical walls of swimming pools that were left empty in the 1976 California drought. This started the vert trend in skateboarding. With increased control, vert skaters could skate faster and perform more dangerous tricks, such as slash grinds and frontside/backside airs. This caused liability concerns and increased insurance costs to skatepark owners, and the development (first by Norcon,then more successfully by Rector) of improved knee pads that had a hard sliding cap and strong strapping proved to be too-little-too-late. During this era, the "freestyle" movement in skateboarding began to splinter off and develop into a much more specialized discipline, characterized by the development of a wide assortment of high flat-ground tricks.

As a result of the "vert" skating movement, skate parks had to contend with high-liability costs that led to many park closures. In response, vert skaters started making their own ramps, while freestyle skaters continued to evolve their flatland style. Thus by the beginning of the 1980s, skateboarding had once again fallen into obscurity. ^[5]

Skateboarder Brandon Cardone does a cliff hanger pivot to fakie (a lip trick) at the former East Coast Terminal Skateboard Park in Johnson City, NY.

[edit] Third generation

The third skateboard generation, from the early/mid eighties to early nineties, was fueled by skateboard companies that were run by skateboarders. The focus was initially on vert ramp skateboarding. The invention of the no-hands aerial (later known as the ollie) by Alan Gelfand in Florida in 1976^[6] and the almost parallel development of the grabbed aerial by George Orton and Tony Alva in California in had made it possible for skaters to perform airs on vertical ramps. While this wave of skateboarding was sparked by commercialized vert ramp skating, a majority of people who skateboarded during this period never rode vert ramps. Because most people couldn't afford to build vert ramps or didn't have access to nearby ramps, street skating gained popularity. Freestyle skating remained healthy throughout this period with pioneers such as Rodney Mullen inventing the basics of modern street skating; the flatground ollie, the kickflip, and the heelflip to name a few. The influence freestyle had on street skating became apparent during the mid-eighties, but street skating was still performed on wide vert boards with short noses, slide rails, and large soft wheels. Skateboarding, however, evolved quickly in the late 1980s to accommodate the street skater. Since few skateparks were available to skaters at this time, street skating pushed skaters to seek out shopping centres and public and private property as their "spot" to skate. Public opposition, and the threat of lawsuits, forced businesses and property owners to ban skateboarding on their property. By 1992, only a small fraction of skateboarders remained as a highly technical version of street skating, combined with the decline of vert skating, produced a sport that lacked the mainstream appeal to attract new skaters.

[edit] Trick skating

See Skateboarding trick for detailed description of trick skating maneuvers

A skater performs a kickflip off a stairset.

With the evolution of skateparks and ramp riding, the skateboard began to change. Early skate tricks had consisted mainly of two-dimensional manoeuvres (e.g. riding on only two wheels (wheelie, a.k.a. manual), spinning like an ice skater on the back wheels (a pivot), or when you ollie a bar and you leave the board and land on it again (nowadays called a "Hippie Jump"), long jumping from one board to another (often over a line of small barrels or fearless teenagers lying on their backs), and slalom.

In 1976, skateboarding was transformed by the invention of the first modern skateboarding trick by Alan "Ollie" Gelfand, the ollie. It remained largely a unique Florida trick from 1976 until the summer of 1978, when Gelfand made his first visit to California. Gelfand and his revolutionary maneuver caught the attention of the West Coast skaters and the media where it began to spread worldwide.

The ollie was reinvented by Rodney Mullen in 1982, who adapted it to freestyle skating by ollieing on flat ground rather than out of a vert ramp. Mullen also invented the ollie kickflip, which, at the time of its invention, was dubbed the "magic flip." The flat ground ollie allowed skateboarders to perform tricks in mid-air without any more equipment than the skateboard itself. The development of these complex tricks by Rodney Mullen and others transformed skateboarding. Skateboarders began performing their tricks down stair sets and on other urban obstacles - they were no longer confined to empty pools and expensive wooden ramps.

Rodney Mullen is seen as one of the main founding fathers of modern skateboarding, inventing most of the tricks used today. He invented over 30 tricks, such as the kickflip, heelflip, and the ollie impossible. Jason Lee was the person to invent the 360 flip later. The act of ollieing onto an obstacle and sliding along it on the trucks of the board is known as "grinding", and has become a mainstay of modern skateboarding.

[edit] Culture

See also: Skate punk

See also: Punk fashion

Skateboarding was, at first, tied to the culture of surfing. As skateboarding spread across the United States to places unfamiliar with surfing or surfing culture, it developed an image of its own. For example, the classic film short Video Days (1991) portrayed skateboarders as reckless rebels.

The image of the skateboarder as a rebellious, non-conforming youth has faded in recent years. The rift between the old image of skateboarding and a newer one is quite visible: magazines such as Thrasher portray skateboarding as dirty, rebellious, and still firmly tied to punk, while other publications, Transworld Skateboarding as an example, paint a more modern, diverse, and controlled picture of skateboarding stars. Furthermore, as more professional skaters use hip hop music accompaniment in their videos, many urban youths and hip-hop fans are drawn to skateboarding, further diluting the sport's punk image.^[7]

Films such as Dishdogz and Lords Of Dogtown, have helped improve the reputation of skateboarding youth, depicting individuals of this subculture as having a positive outlook on life, prone to poking harmless fun at each other, and engaging in healthy sportsman's competition. According to the film, lack of respect, egotism and hostility towards fellow skateboarders is generally frowned upon, albeit each of the characters (and as such, proxies of the "stereotypical" skateboarder) have a firm disrespect for authority and for rules in general. Group spirit is supposed to heavily influence the members of this community. In presentations of this sort, showcasing of criminal tendencies is absent, and no attempt is made to tie extreme sports to any kind of illegal activity.

Go Skateboarding Day was created in 2004 by a group of skateboarding companies to promote skateboarding and help make it more noticeable to the world. It is celebrated every year on June 21st. Gleaming the Cube, a 1989 movie starring Christian Slater as a skateboarding teen investigating the death of his adopted Vietnamese brother was somewhat of an iconic landmark to the skateboarding genre of the era. Many well-known skaters had cameos in the film, including Tony Hawk.

Skateboarding video games have also become very popular in skateboarding culture and are supported by many systems such as the Xbox and Playstation. One of the most popular is Tony Hawk's Underground.

[edit] Skateboarding as a form of transportation

The use of skateboards solely as a form of transportation is primarily associated with the longboard. Depending on local laws, using skateboards as a form of transportation outside residential areas may or may not be legal. In this aspect, ironically, San Francisco has been described as having the most restrictive codes against skateboarding.^[8] Nevertheless, the use of skateboards as transportation in San Francisco remains rampant. Backers cite portability, exercise, and environmental friendliness as some of the benefits of skateboarding as an alternative to automobiles.

[edit] Miscellaneous

A member of Charlie Company 1st Battalion 5th Marines carries a skateboard during military exercise Urban Warrior '99

[edit] Skateboard ban in Norway

The only country ever to ban skateboards was Norway, in the period between 1978 and 1989. The use, ownership and sale of skateboards were forbidden. The ban was said to be due to the perceived high amount of injuries caused by boards. The ban led skateboarders to construct ramps in the forest and other secluded areas to avoid the police.^[9]

[edit] Military experimentation in the United States

It has been publicly reported that the United States Marine Corps tested the usefulness of commercial off-the-shelf skateboards during urban combat military exercises in the late 1990s. Their special purpose has been described as "for maneuvering inside buildings in order to detect tripwires and sniper fire".^[10][11]

[edit] Novice and amateur skate teams

Many novice and amateur skateboarding teams have emerged in the last ten years consisting of groups of talented skateboarders. Amateur skateboarding competitions such as the Free Flow tour among many others allows such teams to compete with each other even though they may not be pro.^{[12][13][14][15]} It gives kids the way to pro and a way to be sponsored.^[16][17][18]

[edit] Notes

[edit] Further reading and information

• Borden, Iain. (2001). Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body. Oxford: Berg.
• Hocking, Justin, Jeffrey Knutson and Jared Maher (Eds.). (2004). Life and Limb: Skateboarders Write from the Deep End. New York: Soft Skull Press.
• Weyland, Jocko. (2002). The Answer is Never: a History and Memoir of Skateboarding. New York: Grove Press.
• Hawk, Tony and Mortimer, Sean. (2000). Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder. New York: HarperCollins.
• Thrasher Magazine. (2001). Thrasher: Insane Terrain. New York: Universe.
• Brooke, Michael (1999) The Concrete Wave - the History of Skateboarding. Warwick Publishing
• Mullen, Rodney and Mortimer, Sean (2003). The Mutt
• Skateboard Kings, a 1978 documentary on skateboarding
• SkateSpotter, a directory of skate spots

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Skateboarding

Look up Skateboarding in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Skating Slang