Skateboard

line of boards, and his sponsors’ financial support dried up. He sold his house, edited surf videos to make ends meet and flew to contests overseas on his own dime. That was the best-case scenario for boarders of the era: Two of Hawk’s biggest 1980s rivals, the young stars Christian Hosoi and Mark Rogowski, went to prison for drugs and murder, respectively. Others died or vanished the way skateboarding seemed to do every ten years.

In the 1990s, skateboarding made yet another comeback—and achieved a new level of visibility with the first X Games, in June 1995. By the 1997 X Games, 198 countries were watching, and the following year Tony Hawk the skater would become Tony Hawk the “Got Milk?” spokesman. At the 1999 X Games, he made international headlines for the first 900-degree spin (2.5 rotations). Soon after, he co-founded USA Skateboarding and began lobbying the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ask: If snowboarding was an event, why not skateboarding? Hawk championed the cause for 15 years, and Olympic skateboarding demonstrations finally began at the 2014 Youth Olympic Games; two years later, the IOC greenlighted skateboarding as an event in the 2020 Tokyo games (now postponed until 2021 amid the Covid-19 pandemic).

Skateboarding remains an American anomaly. It was born here, died here and then came back—again and again and again. In its 60 years, it has been viewed as a menace, an art form and now, finally, a noble athletic pursuit recognized at the highest level of international sports.

“In its early days, skateboarding was considered a sport for misfits and outsiders,” Hawk tells me. “We didn’t mind the label, since we weren’t trying to fit in with mainstream culture anyway.” And even as mainstream culture prepares to embrace skateboarding more enthusiastically than ever before, Hawk says, “I believe our sense of counterculture and individualism will shine through.”