BOARD CERTIFIED
Virginia Beach police officer’s skateboarding performance goes viral
A video of a Virginia Beach officer went viral after the cop hopped on a skateboard and showed off his super stylin’ moves.
VIRGINIA BEACH — Skateboarders and police officers sometimes clash, but last week the two worlds briefly came together.
Instead of chasing skaters from the Oceanfront, Virginia Beach Officer Ryan Borman, 23, wowed them with a couple of sick tricks. While still in uniform, Borman pulled off a kick flip and a 360 flip — two technical moves that involved spinning and flipping the board under his feet before landing back on it.
A spectator caught the moment in a video, which has since gone viral with more than a million views on social media.
Borman made the moves look easy, even though he was wearing a thick vest and a hefty weapon on his belt.
“It actually took a couple of tries,” Borman said in an interview. “The gear’s pretty heavy.”
Borman knows the local skateboarding scene. He grew up hanging out at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront and graduated from First Colonial High School before joining the police department in 2018.
But he didn’t set out to become a social media superstar on April 21. The video, which was posted Wednesday on TikTok, stemmed from a chance encounter between Borman and an old high school friend he spotted skateboarding in an empty parking lot.
On a whim, Borman asked to borrow a board.
Sergey Whitney, a Chesapeake videographer, was there to hit record.
“This is something you don’t see every day,” said Whitney, 27. “I was very shocked in a great way.”
As of Friday evening, 1.5 million people had viewed one video on TikTok. Hundreds of thousands of people had viewed similar videos on other social media platforms, too.
“It’s definitely insane,” Borman said. “I didn’t expect that at all.”
Borman’s aware that the skateboarding community doesn’t always look favorably on law enforcement, but he hopes when people see the video it will help bridge the gap.
“We’re everyday people just like them,” he said. “I grew up doing the same exact stuff they’re doing now.”