Skater girls show the fiercest competitors can still have fun
IIF I HAVE one ambition to take away with me from these Olympic Games, it’s this; to live my life like an Olympic skateboarder. A skateboarding girl to be precise, or woman, though most of the Olympic skateboarders are teenagers. I don’t mean that I want to nail the jumps or fancy tricks, fun though that would be. I’m referring instead to the joy, the camaraderie the overwhelming sisterhood that we saw at the Ariake Urban Sports Park yesterday, in one of the finest Olympic displays of these Games.
You may not be surprised to learn that the Park Skateboard final was my first competitive skateboarding experience. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Standing in the media pen by the edge of the concrete bowl, I first saw this was a sport like few others before the heats got under way.
Team GB’s Sky Brown, a superstar both in and outside of the sport, was waiting for her turn to warm up, alongside Kokona Hiraki of Japan.
Two of the big-name favourites for this first Olympic final were chatting, laughing and playfully punching each other on the arm before going into battle. I could have been watching two friends hanging out at the local skatepark after school, rather than athletes on the brink of Olympic history.
At first, I assumed theirs was a kinship of age, a shared understanding of the entirely unique pressure of being the youngest competitors in the history of their respective countries to represent at a summer Games. Thirteen-year-old Brown and 12-year-old Hiraki were the only two to understand that peculiar place in the record books.
But then, the heats started, and I realised every young woman out there was cheering, supporting and commiserating every move of their Olympic rivals.
Minutes before the final, when nerves and stress should have been at their most intense, I saw the US skater Bryce Wettstein hugging the Australian Poppy Olsen before her run, patting her helmeted head in encouragement.
As Wettstein walked away, she turned on her heels as though suddenly realising something. ‘Hey, this is your song!’ she shouted, pointing at Olsen excitedly, as ACDC’s TNT blasted out over the venue PA system, before skating off to get ready for her own final.
Again, it was a moment more evocative of a school trip, or a girls’ holiday, than the amphitheatre of an Olympic final.
Fittingly, the most touching example of support and compassion came on the very last move of the competition. The Japanese world champion Misugu Okamoto finished top in the qualifying rounds, so performed her runs last. Having not managed to stick either of her first two runs, her medal and Olympic hopes rested on the final attempt.
Once again however, she was unable to complete a clean run, and fell to the ground in tears. Almost immediately, she was surrounded by her international rivals, who gripped her in a group bear hug before lifting her on their shoulders.
Even in an Olympics that have been refreshingly emotional and human, it was, for me, the single most touching moment of the Games. In a world where bringing down others is still seen as an acceptable way to rise to your own success, this was something else entirely. Here was a bunch of young women, striving to be the very best they could be, on the top of their game, literally holding each other up like the very incarnation of a Taylor Swift dream.
Not that this kind of mutual support has been lacking at these Games. Simone Biles, sitting in the grandstands and supporting rivals from every nation when she had withdrawn from most of the artistic gymnastics finals, was already an indicator of what feels like a new kind of sportswomanship.
Or, indeed, sportsmanship if we look at the high jump gold medal shared between fierce rivals, and close friends, Mutaz Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi.
But this kind of compassionate competitiveness could be seen at another level at the women’s skateboarding. For those who balk at the thought of elite athletes showing anything less than contempt for their rivals, crucially, it did nothing to dull the ferocity of competition or the need to win. Okamoto’s tears were testament to that.
Finally, we are seeing Olympic sports where competitors are succeeding because they’re having fun. Where it’s not all about the 5am winter starts and the depths of darkness one can plummet to in order to find that glimmer of gold.
As with BMX, we are watching sports that make us want to get out there and have a go, not for the novelty factor, not for the six pack, but for the laugh. And God knows we could do with a bit of that right now.
My only regret when watching the skateboarding final was that it was on TV too early in the morning for my six-year-old daughter to watch, but I will be making sure she does.
It’s completely irrelevant to me whether she’ll be inspired to start trying tricks at the local skatepark. What I want her to see is a very new, very modern, dare I say girl’s version of what success can be.
There is a mantra that pops up intermittently on my social media feeds, for which I have an unironic fondness. Kick ass with kindness. These girls have shown just how that can be done.
It was more evocative of a school trip or a holiday than an Olympic final