On cloud nine, Sky who’s our champ at just 13!
With bronze for skateboarding at just 13, meet the £3.6m Nike star (and dance show winner) who defied a cracked skull to go for glory
SKY Brown became our youngest ever Olympic medallist yesterday.
The 13-year-old daredevil, pictured, wept after claiming bronze in a thrilling skateboarding final.
She said: ‘I’m so stoked. I can’t believe it. It’s like a dream.’
At 13 years and 29 days, Sky is not only the youngest British medallist but also Team GB’s youngest ever Olympian. The record had been set by swimmer Margery Hinton, who was 13 years and 44 days old at the 1928 Amsterdam games, where she did not win a medal.
Her father Stuart, a marketing executive from Cornwall, said after her success yesterday: ‘She’s straight back to school and going to do the things that families do.’
He had watched nervously as Sky, who has a Japanese mother, twice fell attempting her special stunt of flipping the skateboard over in mid air – a kickflip indy trick – before nailing it on her final run to get herself on the podium.
Sky, who signed a deal with Nike aged ten, is thought to be worth around £3.6million thanks to endorsements from brands such as Vans, Billabong and Mattel, which has made a Barbie doll in her likeness. Skateboarding is one of five debut sports at Tokyo. The others are surfing, climbing, karate and baseball.
We had been discussing the bruises on Sky Brown’s legs – 39, she declared proudly, before she leapt onto her skateboard, to amass a few more.
It was March 2019. She was ten years old and had just received UK Sport funding to help her qualify for the Olympic Games. She was showing me her skills at a skateboarding park in Salford.
My abiding memory? Sheer terror. emphasis on the sheer. I’d picked my way gingerly around the top of the performance ‘bowl’, not daring to venture too close to the edge. She was right on the edge (of sporting glory, yes, but here I’m meaning more literally).
We were discussing Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj, then she tipped her board and simply disappeared down the drop. No helmet. No knee pads. Aarrgh! She swooshed down and up the other side, her little body (just 4ft of it) flipping upside down on the turn.
It was like watching a child run into traffic. I remember feeling like a killjoy when asking her dad Stuart: a) how he hadn’t fainted; and b) how he could possibly sanction this without a helmet at least.
‘It’s the thing we have most arguments about,’ he replied.
‘She hates the pads, but we insist on them for the bigger bowls, and if she’s on concrete.’
How did it feel for Sky, though? ‘It felt like I was flying,’ she told me. ‘The minute I stop, I want to do it again, but higher’.
The images our photographer Bruce took that day were extraordinary but, oh, the stomach churning sensation when it was decided he would lie on the floor and she would jump over him on her skateboard. This kid was ten years old! Were we insured for this? What if? How would it end?
Now we know. It has ended – this chapter anyway – with Sky becoming our youngest ever Olympic medallist, aged just 13.
There were more bruises along the way, of course. Indeed much worse. In 2020 Sky, who was born in Japan but to a British father, hence her qualifying for Team GB, almost died when a ‘trick’ went disastrously wrong.
The little girl who had told me proudly that she hadn’t broken a bone shattered her wrist and hand, and cracked her skull.
She was unconscious when she was airlifted to hospital. even her parents wanted her to stop then. ‘They didn’t want me to skate anymore,’ she admitted. Happily for her Olympic ambitions, they relented, and let her soar again.
And how. The fact that she is only just a teenager was reflected in her infectious reaction to her win.
‘It was a super sick final,’ she said after that heart-stopping event. ‘All the girls were ripping it, it was insane. I’m so stoked. I can’t believe it, it’s unbelievable. The medal feels unreal, it’s like a dream. I can’t wait to show the medal to my family and friends.
‘I was a little nervous but I’m happy to be here and honestly, I just wanted to land my trick. I didn’t really care what place I got, I wanted to land my trick.
‘I really hope I inspire some girls. I feel like people think I’m too young and I can’t do it but, if you believe in yourself, you can do anything. I believed in myself and I’m here.’
What a role model. Doubtless, sales of skateboards will soar now.
But those perhaps hoping to emulate Sky’s success might want to think carefully before just grabbing a skateboard and pushing off.
Her skills have been honed within a very specific set of circumstances, and shaped by geography and culture as much as genes and hard graft. Her father was a keen surfer who had moved from england to the United States as a child.
He learned to surf in California, and at one point worked in marketing for a surf company before he moved to Japan, where he met
his wife Mieko. When they had Sky, he did not expect her to be a surfer. ‘I thought she’d want to do things with her mum,’ he told me.
‘Mum things rather than dad things. She’s taught me a lot about gender equality’. Sky could surf almost before she could walk, and would urge her dad ‘higher, higher’ when they hit the waves together.
They lived on the beach, making it entirely possible for her to get a session in before school. Indeed she would be out at 5am most days.
Before long she had embraced skateboarding too (she hopes to compete at the next Games on a surfboard as well as her trusty skateboard).
The skills required are similar but you can skateboard anywhere, she told me. Her father laughed about how they kept getting told off when she tried to skateboard her way through airports.
SHE knows about airports. Her childhood was split between the US and Japan with the contrasting cultures coming together in an extraordinary way.
Yes, with her blonde hair flying behind her, she seems to embody the Californian beach vibe but this has gone hand in hand with a Japanese work ethic.
At the time we met she was at school in Japan and while her teachers were tolerant of her sporting commitments, there was an understanding with her family that her schoolwork came first.
That the family built a skateboard park in their garden speaks volumes about where they felt Sky was heading, though.
Her mother Meiko rarely travels with the family and although she has always been supportive (she was in tears at her daughter’s Olympic success, by all accounts), it’s in a lower key way.
‘She doesn’t like to be in the limelight,’ her dad told me. ‘It is not the Japanese way.’
Of course, Sky could have represented Japan in the Olympics, but her Dad was candid about feeling that the training there would have been ‘more formal’.
‘I think Team GB would suit her more,’ he said. There has been a mix-n-match approach, though. Sky still breakfasts on kimchi and fermented soya beans rather than cornflakes.
Was there always an eye on commercial possibilities? Her Olympic success will make her rich beyond her wildest dreams (it’s estimated she is already worth £3.6million) but Sky was already on that path.
She was seven when she won her first sponsorship deal and by ten had signed a deal with Nike, becoming their youngest ambassador.
Her father has always rejected the idea that his marketing background played a part, pointing out that when he put the first video of her in action on YouTube, he had no idea how the channel even worked. Sky now has over a million followers on Instagram.
On the money side, it helps that she’s embraced showbiz as well as sport. In 2018 she appeared on the junior version of Dancing with the Stars, the American version of Strictly Come Dancing – no mean feat given than she didn’t know how to dance. Why do it then?
‘It sounded fun,’ she told me. She won, of course.
In the flesh, she is quite extraordinary, a tiny dynamo who simply wants to have fun, to fly, and, above all, to win.
Her little brother Ocean, nine (who has since gone on to become a professional skateboarder too) was with her that day, and what was striking was how competitive the two were.
They chatted away about their travels and how they would compete to eat the spiciest chilli or most stomach-churning food.
Sky usually won (she could lay claim to eating a tarantula in a restaurant in Cambodia).
Where will she go next? We can hazard a guess: higher.