The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Sablone more than average Olympian
State native takes part in first skateboarding event
Half a world away, a goofy-footed, 34-year-old skateboarder from Old Saybrook with a decidedly non-goofy master’s degree in architecture from MIT, will compete Monday in the Olympic Games.
“Alexis Sablone!” Andy Bennett, 17, said. “Pretty sick.”
Sunday is fun day at Groton Skatepark, considered one of the best facilities in Connecticut. The place is packed. The place is not packed late Wednesday afternoon, although older skaters begin to filter in as dusk settles.
Marcus Doyle of Marlboro, observing his 10-yearold son Henry, was aware skateboarding is an Olympic sport for the first time in Tokyo. He did not know about Sablone. Dakota Martinelli, a 20-year-old Navy man from Texas stationed in Groton, didn’t know skateboarding had become an Olympic sport. He has skated for only two months.
“A buddy just said, hey, get on,” Martinelli said. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know how.’ He just kind of pushed me on the board. Now I love everything about it.
“Just the way your mind goes when you’re going. It’s just a whole ‘nother world. It’s something you can start up and drop at any point. It doesn’t matter if you’re rusty or doing flips. Just keep going.”
When the men and women of the first U.S. Olympic street and park skateboard team — teenagers to thirtysomethings — were introduced in Los Angeles last month, it was fitting all 12 showed up with their unique look.
Skateboarding is individual expression as much as quantitative competition. As demanding and daring as any athletic pursuit on the planet, even the greatest skateboarders have wondered where it fits in with the intensively organized sporting world.
“There’s the sportification of skateboard happening,” Sablone told Mary Carillo on HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. “But skateboarding itself isn’t a sport.”
The Summer X Games, where Sablone has won six medals, including three gold, since 2009 in the street event, have altered how folks view the ollie and McTwist. Still, it’s fairly safe to say French baron Pierre de Coubertin didn’t have a skateboard venue in his dreams when he founded the modern Olympic Games in 1896.
“I never, ever world have expected this,” Sablone told reporters at media day in LA. “Skateboarding is about freedom and all that stuff. In some ways it’s not about competition, but here we are. It’s not something I ever predicted, but it’s an incredible honor to be here doing this.”
Yeah, pretty sick. Bennett said a classmate of his at Old Lyme High turned to him a couple of years ago and said, “You skateboard, right?” When he said yes, Frank Sablone told him all about his stepsister who now lives in a Brooklyn studio. Skateboarder, architect, artist, animator, sculptor.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’ I didn’t even know,” said Bennett, who has been skateboarding for six years. “I think it inspires a lot of people. There are a lot more girls out here skating.”
Does Frank Sablone skate?
“Nah, not that I know,” Bennett said. “He’s a basketball star at the high school.”
Alexis started when she was 10. Mostly she skated alone in her garage. Her dad, Fran, built a box she could jump up on and put a rail on it. There was a small skate club in Milford and her mom Terry, or Fran would drive her. Or she’d take the train. When they went to pick her up, Alexis would be drenched in sweat.
She met Trevor Thompson, a pro rider from Connecticut and they skated together every weekend. The first time she went to Camp Woodward one summer in Pennsylvania, she was the only girl skateboarding.
“Once Alexis really got into the sport, it was like the eighth grade,” said Fran, a longtime Connecticut attorney. “It wasn’t all that popular around here. People knew Tony Hawk (who skated at Groton). She’d work at it and work at it.
“Alexis is a very deep thinker, always quiet and deep in thought. Unlike team sports, I think it allowed her to focus and concentrate on her inner being.”
Basketball, soccer, oneyear lacrosse, Alexis was always athletic. Her older sister Lindsay, a senior at the time, and Alexis, a freshman, both started on the Hopkins School basketball team. Fran remembered arriving at the gym and Alexis just shaking her head.
“She’d rather us, or anybody, not be there,” Fran said. “She would never tell us when her competition was in skateboarding. Obviously, it wasn’t a traditional sport, but you never want to hinder the dreams or opportunities that kids want to foster. No one ever would have thought it would come to this. If that’s her passion, let her pursue it.
“She has worked so hard for so many years, all through college and grad schools. We’re very proud of her. This is an amazing accomplishment, really. So self-sufficient. Her education and athleticism are probably only exceeded by her humility. She never wanted attention.”
While at Woodward Camp, Alexis met some Boston kids and ended up going there one summer. That would lead to her part in the 2002 Coliseum video cult skateboard classic, “P.J. Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life.” At age 16, she skated to “Mambo Italiano” by Rosemary Clooney. The skateboarding world suddenly knew Alexis Sablone.
There were sponsors and there were competitions and neither paid like the men’s end of the sport. She graduated from Barnard College at Columbia and used the money from contests to help pay for her master’s at MIT. It wasn’t until 2019 with a Converse deal, that she made some real endorsement money. Like her dad said, Alexis is self-sufficient. No drink, no drugs. And if it were up to her, no competition in skateboard.
“Competition for me is definitely unpleasant,” Sablone told Carillo. “It’s like the most stress you’ve ever been in. When I think about just the start of a contest, I can get a heart palpitation. Someone standing in front of you, counting you down, and then just ‘Go,’ like, skateboard on command. I remember being like ‘I hate contests, I never want to do that again.’ ”
Said her father, “Alexis views it as a form of art or expression. She never liked the competition part of it, the scoring, the first, second, third. I think she’ll be the happiest Olympian in the world that no fans will be at the events.”
Goofy-footed is the term for when the skater uses the left foot up front and pushes with the right foot. It’s the kind of term that makes people smile and want to say, ‘Dude … sick … gnarly … rad.” People unfortunately also stereotype the negatives.
“My son stepped on one of my old skateboards a year and a half ago and declared this is what he’s going to do for his life,” Marcus Doyle said. “I’m telling you I’ve met the nicest kids skateboarding.”
Sure, Alexis Sablone knows she could get beat by a teenager who hasn’t graduated from high school. She also gets to skate as a Renaissance woman.
MIT. Skateboarder. Designer of a skateable sculptor called “Lady in the Square” in Malmo, Sweden. Designer on a One-Star Pro Converse sneaker. A student of the Brutalist style of the Temple Street Garage in New Haven. And just maybe a gold medalist at Ariake Urban Sports Park.
“I love everything about skateboarding,” Andy Bennett said. “It’s terrifying, and then I’m just rolling away and don’t even know what happened. Skateboarding is the best thing ever.
“Getting to watch someone like Alexis Sablone at the Olympics is gonna be crazy.”
Yo, it’s gonna be sick.