'It just is always building': Women's skateboarding competition showed IOC was wise to include in Tokyo Olympics

TOKYO — Alexis Sablone has seen the shifts in women’s skateboarding. She came into the sport with her own idols – Elissa Steamer and Jaime Reyes – though she had fewer to choose from.

During her career, competition opportunities grew, video parts gave girls a chance to express themselves and sponsors took notice – even if more focus has remained on the men.

From fourth place, Sablone helped it progress further and saw it shift again. The only American to make the women’s street final in skateboarding’s debut in the Olympics, Sablone felt the historic moment.

At 34, these will be her only Games. But a trio of teens atop the podium put Sablone in the cross currents of where her sport has been and where it’s going. A pair of 13-year-olds – Japan’s Momiji Nishiya and Brazil’s Rayssa Leal – claimed gold and silver, respectively, while 16-year-old Japanese skateboarder Funa Nakayama won bronze.

“The first time I saw Momiji or Rayssa or several of the younger girls, for so long, the female scene, especially the competition scene … wasn’t moving as quickly as it has in the last two years,” Sablone said. “The level has been remarkable to see. The second I saw them two years ago when they were 11 or 12 or whatever, I knew what was happening.

“I was like, ‘We’re finally here.’ Female skateboarders have reached the critical mass. There’s enough now that there will be prodigies and they’re here, and they’re going to show the other girls and the world what’s possible.”

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That’s exactly what the International Olympic Committee was hoping for. Skateboarding was one of several sports – including surfing and sport climbing - added five years ago at the request of Tokyo organizers in an effort to draw a younger audience.

Seeing the success it had with sports like snowboarding and freeskiing in the Winter Olympics, skateboarding offered the Games a way to stay relevant. And skateboarding it here to stay for the near future, it seems.

The sport is already included in the program for Paris in 2024. Los Angeles, the host in 2028, has not announced which additional sports it wants in its program, but it’s inconceivable that the sport’s birthplace wouldn’t include it in the Games.

“I think that they are getting cool points because everyone knows that skateboarding is cool,” Sablone said.

“What skateboarding gets from it, I think a different kind of respect. I think for a long time, people counted skateboarders out as punks or defacers of property. And there’s a lot of hard work and dedication to deciding to jump over and over again and falling down repeatedly just to do something because you decided to do it.”

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For some of the skateboarders here, doing that came with little example or anyone to show them what the sport could be for women. There were no pathways, so they made them.

Brazilian Leticia Bufoni, an 11-time X Games medalist, said she remembers her dad breaking her skateboard in half when she was 10 years old. She went out and asked a friend for another board the next day and, though she said “convincing my dad was harder than to get into the Olympics,” he became one of her biggest supporters.

“I try to be expression that I didn’t have when I started skating because when I started skating, I had no one that I could show my dad that women can skate,” said Bufoni, 28, who finished ninth in prelims and just missed competing in the finals.

“So I want to be that girl that the little girls can show their parents and be like, 'she can skate. I want to be like her.'”

That drove American Mariah Duran, who as recently as a few years ago was renting an AirBnb in California with Canadian Annie Guglia, working a part-time job and living on peanut butter and jelly so they could skate and film together.

Duran and Guglia, who both competed here Monday, were part of “Quit Your Day Job,” which was released in 2017 as the first full-length female skate film in more than a decade.

“There’s a noticeable amount of girls just hopping on a board now and trying to get good because they can visually see what is possible,” Duran said. “I could only count the number of girls on my hand for the people that I looked up to.

“It just is always building, so you really never know where it’s gonna go.”

The women’s competition here Monday proved the IOC wise in its inclusion for the Tokyo Games.

Over four preliminary rounds and the final, the 20 athletes who took part landed creative, technical tricks that even if the general viewer couldn’t decipher what a "kickflip backside 50-50 on the hubba" means could fairly assess that it looked cool.

Duran hoped girls would be inspired to pick up a board, that the Olympics had given her sport such a broad platform that it could help it grow.

Skateboarding has embraced the Games in many ways despite its counterculture roots much in the way that snowboarding did in the Winter Games. Depending on the athlete, the Olympics might or might not be their biggest goal – and that’s OK.

“You don’t have to step on a board and be like, 'I’m gonna be an Olympian,'” Duran said. “You can step on a board and find as much joy just cruising down the street. It’s all about the individual and where they want to take it.

“I’ve described it as a big tree. The culture is going to always be the root, and you as the individual is going to branch as far as you need to go. … You can go to the Olympics. You can go to X Games or you can street skate or you can just cruise on the sidewalk. There’s not right or wrong way.”

Sablone hopes the sport keeps that ethos, that the money that comes from mainstream attention doesn’t steer it away from core values of individualism and expression. On Monday, she was more excited about the future for skateboarding and the Olympics’ role in it.

Skateboarding still has a long way to go in terms of putting the women on par with men, but the teens atop the podium can help push the industry there.

Indeed, they already see it differently from the women who pushed for the opportunities that now exist. Asked if she’d ever imagined a time when girls could not skateboard, Leal said she hadn’t.

“I don’t think we can have preconceived ideas about sports. It’s not right to think well, you have to study, you can’t go and skateboard because skate is for boys,” she said. “I didn’t listen to that kind of message. … Skateboarding is for everyone.”