Local skateboarder leads sport to global stage
Coach ventures to China this week to help competitors on ride to 2020 Olympics
When the International Olympic Committee announced it wanted to add skateboarding to the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, it ignited a firestorm in the skate world.
Author Sean Mortimer, in an article for the skateboarding website RIDE Channel, compared the Olympics-inspired division to a civil war. One of the questions up for debate was whether skateboarding is a sport deserving of Olympic rings or rather more of a culture that should remain outside Olympic purview.
“Skateboarding should not be viewed or utilized as a sport or a game or used as a marketing tool,” read one online petition circulated by a self-described group of skateboarders asking the Olympics to forgo adding the sport.
“Olympic recognition will not do justice to the purity, individuality, and uniqueness of skateboarding culture,” the petition said.
Nearly 7,500 people signed that years-old petition, even as recently as two weeks ago, to no avail.
Skateboarding is officially on the roster for the 2020 Olympic Games. And despite lingering uncertainty as to how exactly that will work for Team USA, local skateboard coach Joe Lehm is doing what he can to help athletes, and the sport, prepare for a new level of international competition.
“A lot of skateboarders have the attitude that the Olympics need skateboarding more than skateboarding needs the Olympics, so why do it?” Lehm said. “I felt like, it’s going to be in either way, so I might as well get involved to make sure they do it right.”
Lehm, 55, is the founder of the local Skate School Santa Fe and a well-known downhill racer. He has organized multiple skateboarding events, as well as both junior and pro skateboarding teams. Earlier this week, he left for Nanjing, China, to help eight U.S. skateboarders, six men and two women, navigate the new rules of an Olympic-recognized skateboarding event as a team manager of sorts.
The skateboarders will compete Thursday through Saturday in the Vert World Championships, turning tricks on a ramp that non-skate-boarders might find similar to the half-pipe in Olympic snowboarding events.
Lehm initially got involved with the Olympic effort in the hopes that he could convince the Olympic committee to incorporate downhill racing — his passion and expertise — as one of its skateboarding disciplines.
The committee opted instead to highlight street-style skateboarding, which involves performing tricks off urban obstacles, such as benches and stairs, and park-style skateboarding, in which riders use ramps and other obstacles found in a skate park.
Downhill racing didn’t make it into the 2020 Games, but Lehm decided to stay involved to help the sport prepare for the Tokyo Games. Organization is not something that always comes naturally in skateboarding, Lehm said.
“[Skateboarding] is an individual sport born out of that ‘don’t tell me what to do’ generation,” he said. “It’s kind of against the grain to get organized.”
As such, Lehm said, there are a number of concepts that are not as established in skateboarding as they are in other sports — familiarity with the Olympics’ anti-doping rules, for example, or organized competition that doesn’t revolve around brand sponsorship.
“As a kid, watching the Olympics, I always thought it was amazing that some kid from Bangladesh could work his way up through everything and end up on the Olympic podium with a gold medal. It didn’t matter who he rode for or his brand,” Lehm said. “That clear and fair path to the Olympics, that’s a path that’s not existed in skateboarding.”
Currently, the future U.S. skateboarding team is also lacking a governing body. The U.S. Olympic Committee requires that a nonprofit organization govern each sport, but as of Wednesday, the committee had not finalized which group would oversee skating for the 2020 Olympic competition, a committee spokesperson confirmed. The committee expects to choose a governing body this fall.
Lehm is working with USA Roller Sports, one of two groups vying for the privilege to oversee Team USA Skateboarding in 2020. He’s joined the group’s skateboarding-specific committee in the hopes of supporting that bid and the skateboarders who would eventually join Team USA.
These athletes make Olympic recognition of the skateboarding worthwhile in Lehm’s eyes.
“The skaters who just want to smoke pot and ride the bowl on Saturdays, they’re still skateboarders. It’s not affecting them. It’s not detracting from what they’re doing,” Lehm said. “But for the ones who want to excel — I think it should be in the Olympics for them.”