Skateboarding forefather Tony Hawk is a whip smart dude and has well articulated thoughts on his sports inclusion in the Olympic games. The Birdman wrote a “thing” for Medium.com to express his opinions and its a quick read that deserves a couple minutes of your time. Thanks to Medium for giving Tony a platform and Tony for clear and concise writing:
“I wrote a thing about skateboarding in the Olympics:
Skateboarding will be in the Olympics in less than two years. I spent my weekend at the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires to get a better perspective of how that will work and my potential role in the process. The politics and bureaucracy are complicated at best, but there are a few people working tirelessly on skateboarding’s behalf that are up for the challenge. Although I am sometimes chosen to be an “ambassador” to skating, I am not one of them. In many ways, I am on the outside looking in with a critical perspective. I believe the Olympics need the “cool” factor of skateboarding for their summer games more than skateboarding needs their validation, in the same way snowboarding provided a youthful energy to the winter games. I also believe that skateboarding has leverage in keeping the format authentic and the culture represented properly. There are many issues to work through: governing bodies, qualifying events, judging, mandatory apparel, helmet usage, etc. And it all seems overwhelmingly impossible to resolve when you’ve attended the stagnant meetings or are cc’d in email chains. I am often asked how this will all work and I don’t have all the answers; I only have decades of experience that hopefully leads to a voice of reason in a web of conflicting interests.
The naysayers are loud and clear: skateboarding is not a sport and we didn’t start doing it in order to win medals or to be embraced by the mainstream. This sentiment is true in many ways, but we’ve had skateboard competitions since the beginning. There is a human desire to be rated through comparison. Even those that despise skate contests or who staunchly denounce that skateboarding is not a sport are content to pass judgement on who has the best style, what tricks are acceptable or who has the best flick. No matter how pure our intentions are, we still tend to judge in the most informal settings.
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images from tony hawk ig