Brave Brown hopes to inspire other girls
SKY BROWN will complete a remarkable recovery from a fractured skull when the skateboarder competes as Team
GB’s youngest Olympian in Tokyo.
The 13-year-old also suffered lacerations to her heart and lungs, and a broken left arm and hand when she fell head-first from a 4.5-metre ramp while training in May last year.
She was left with temporary memory loss after being knocked out, but the horrific experience dimmed none of her enthusiasm for the sport and she was back skating within two months.
‘I was just skating, like every day, and then I was knocked out — I don’t remember anything about the fall,’ she told The Guardian. ‘But it actually made me more excited and pumped up. It made me want to go harder.’
Brown divides her time between California and Japan, where she was born to a Japanese mother and English father. She switched allegiance from Japan to Britain in March 2019 because she preferred the ‘more relaxed approach’ of her adopted country’s governing body.
Aged only 10 at the time of the first
TOUGH CUSTOMER:
Olympic qualifier, she won it despite competing with her arm in a cast, having broken it in another accident.
She has also won world championship bronze and is ranked third globally but shows no signs of pressure from the expectations on her.
Instead, with skateboarding making its debut at the Olympics, she hopes to inspire a whole generation of skaters to take up the sport.
‘I’m not nervous,’ she said. ‘I want to try to push boundaries and close the gender gap in skateboarding. I hope I can inspire some girls.
‘It would be so cool to get a gold medal. But more than that, I want to inspire people.’