Unit 10 · Street, Video and the World Stage

Before home video, most skaters learned new tricks from magazines. Thrasher began in 1981, and TransWorld SKATEboarding began in 1983. A photo froze one moment, often the highest point of a trick. A reader could see where the board was, but not how the feet got it there.

Home VHS players spread through American homes in the 1980s. In 1984, Powell Peralta released The Bones Brigade Video Show. Companies saw that a team video could sell boards and show off their riders. Skaters could watch a trick, rewind it, and watch it again in slow motion.

Tapes were also easy to copy. A skater with two VCRs could record a friend’s tape onto a blank one. Copies traveled through mail, schools and skate shops. A trick filmed in California could reach a kid in Ohio or Ontario within months. Video became the main way tricks moved from place to place.

In 1991, the skate company Blind released Video Days. Blind had been started by the street skater Mark Gonzales. The video was directed by Spike Jonze, who later became a well-known Hollywood film director. It is shorter than most movies, but skaters still talk about it decades later.

Video Days followed a small crew, including Mark Gonzales, Guy Mariano and Jason Lee. Jason Lee later became a film and television actor. Each skater had a part, a section of the video built around one rider, set to a song. The skating happened on streets, in parking lots and on school grounds, not on big ramps.

The style felt relaxed and playful. Riders rolled smoothly, linked tricks together and used whatever the city offered. Many viewers saw for the first time that a curb, a bench or a bank of concrete could be a whole skatepark. The video helped make street skating the center of the sport in the early 1990s.

In 1992, the company Plan B released Questionable. Its team included Rodney Mullen, Danny Way and Colin McKay. Mullen had already invented many flat-ground tricks in the 1980s. Questionable showed very technical street skating, with flip tricks linked into grinds and slides. It also showed skaters on large handrails and long sets of stairs.

Questionable raised the bar for what a pro had to do on film. Other companies answered with their own videos. Each new video tried to show tricks no one had filmed before. The word technical came to describe skating with many fast, precise flips and spins of the board.

Skaters also wanted news faster than a yearly team video. In 1993, 411 Video Magazine began sending out a new tape every few months. Each issue mixed clips from many companies, contests and cities. For a kid far from California, a new issue showed what was happening across the whole skate world.

Many 1980s boards rolled on wheels about 60 millimeters or more across. Those wheels were made for ramps and pools. In the early 1990s, street skaters shrank their wheels. Some rode wheels around 40 millimeters across, much smaller than a wheel today. Wheel size is the diameter, the distance straight across the wheel through its center.

Small wheels did three things. They made the whole board lighter, so it was easier to flip. They put the deck closer to the ground, so the board had less distance to travel when it popped. They also let the skater feel the board land under the feet. For flip tricks on flat ground, that helped.

Small wheels also had problems, and physics explains them. A small wheel meets the edge of a crack or pebble at a steeper angle, so more of its forward motion is stopped. Riders got tossed by tiny bumps. Small, hard wheels also wore flat spots faster when a skater skidded. By the late 1990s, many skaters moved back toward medium sizes, around the low 50s.

A 1980s deck often looked like a fish or a wide paddle. It had a big kicked-up tail and a short, small nose. Those boards worked well on ramps and in pools, where riders mostly used the tail. On the street, though, skaters began doing tricks off the front of the board as well as the back.

By the early 1990s, most street decks had a double kick: a nose and a tail turned up at about the same angle. The outline looked like a popsicle stick, so people called it the popsicle shape. Decks also grew narrower. A narrow, even board was lighter and easier to flip with the feet.

The new shape changed the tricks. With a real nose, a skater could pop off the front of the board. That move is the nollie, short for nose ollie. A double-kick board also rides the same in either direction, which made switch and fakie tricks easier. Almost every street deck sold today still uses this shape.

Every skater has a usual stance. Regular skaters ride with the left foot in front, and goofy skaters ride with the right foot in front. Both are normal. Riding fakie means keeping your usual stance but rolling backward, toward your back foot. Riding switch means standing the opposite way, with your usual back foot in front.

You can learn to roll fakie on flat ground once you can push and stop well. Wear a buckled helmet and wrist guards, and pick a smooth, empty spot. First, roll forward slowly with both feet over the bolts. Next, stop, then gently push off a wall or a friend’s hand so the board rolls backward. Keep your knees bent and your weight centered between the trucks. Look over your back shoulder at where you are going.

A common problem is leaning too far toward the nose, which makes the board shoot out. The fix is to keep your shoulders lined up over the board and stay low. Switch feels strange at first, like writing with your other hand. In the 1990s, street pros learned whole sets of tricks switch and fakie, which doubled the number of tricks they could do.

Street skaters looked at cities differently. A low concrete ledge beside a planter, a long curb or a set of marble benches became something to grind or slide on. A grind is when the metal trucks scrape along an edge. A slide is when the wooden deck itself moves along the edge.

Skaters rubbed wax on edges so the trucks and deck would slide farther. Wax lowers the friction between the metal or wood and the concrete. Friction is the force that pushes back against something sliding. Less friction meant a longer grind before the board slowed and stopped.

Wide open plazas drew crowds of skaters. In the early 1990s, the Embarcadero plaza on San Francisco’s waterfront became one of the most filmed spots in the world. Skaters met there daily, and videos showed its ledges and gaps again and again. City rules and redesigns later pushed skaters out, a pattern that repeated in many cities.

In the mid-1980s, Mark Gonzales was filmed and photographed sliding down handrails, and he is often credited with some of the first handrail tricks. By the early 1990s, videos such as Questionable showed pros sliding long rails and jumping down big sets of stairs. A handrail is a metal rail built for people to hold on stairs. A stair set is a group of steps skaters count, such as a five-stair.

These clips look smooth because they show the one try that worked. Pros often took dozens of tries and many hard falls to film one. A fall from a rail adds the height of the stairs to the fall. Stairs, handrails and gaps on public property are not places to learn. They also put skaters near walkers and cars.

Learners start low and build up. At a skatepark, a flat bar is a metal rail a few inches off the ground, and a painted curb is even lower. Wear a buckled helmet, wrist guards and pads. Practice the move on a low bar until it feels easy before ever thinking about anything higher. If a move feels scary, break it into smaller pieces, such as rolling beside the bar first.

In many towns, the local skate shop was the center of skating. It sold decks, trucks, wheels and shoes. It also held things a skater could not buy at a big store: advice, the newest magazines and a television playing the latest video. Before the internet, the shop was often the only place to learn what was new.

Shop workers were usually skaters themselves. They set up boards, tightened trucks and told new riders which wheels fit their spots. Many shops sponsored a shop team, a group of local skaters who got discounts or free gear and represented the shop at contests. For a young skater, making the shop team was a first step toward being noticed.

Shops also gathered people. A new video might have a premiere, a first showing at the shop, with the whole local scene crowded in. Shops organized small contests in parking lots and lobbied city councils for skateparks. They gave skaters, often treated as a problem on the street, a place where they belonged.

Street skating used public and private spaces built for other things. Owners worried about chipped ledges, noise and people getting hurt. Many cities passed bans, laws or rules saying no skateboarding in certain places. Signs reading No Skateboarding went up on plazas, schools and shopping centers. Skaters could be fined or have boards taken.

Skaters answered with a short slogan: Skateboarding Is Not a Crime. It appeared on stickers, shirts and board graphics through the 1980s and 1990s. The slogan argued that skating was a healthy activity, not a danger to the public. It also pointed out that many towns had banned street skating without building anywhere else to go.

Philadelphia’s LOVE Park shows the pattern. Through the 1990s, its smooth granite ledges made it one of the most famous street spots in the world. In the early 2000s the city enforced a ban on skating there, despite protests. The plaza was later rebuilt. Fights like this led many cities to build public skateparks instead.

In the 1980s, most famous skaters rode vert ramps and pools. Two young Californians helped change that. Natas Kaupas grew up skating the streets of Santa Monica. He rode up walls, ollied onto benches and was filmed spinning on top of a fire hydrant. Each of these showed that ordinary city objects could be skated.

Mark Gonzales, nicknamed the Gonz, rode with a loose, imaginative style. He tried tricks no one had named yet, and he is often credited with early handrail slides. He later started the company Blind, which made Video Days. Gonzales is also a painter and writer whose art has been shown in galleries.

Both skaters built style: the personal way a skater moves, beyond whether the trick lands. Skaters often say style matters as much as difficulty. Gonzales and Kaupas showed that creativity, seeing a new use for a wall or curb, could change the whole sport. The street era of the 1990s grew from what they started.

In 1995, the sports network ESPN held a new event called the Extreme Games in Rhode Island. It gathered sports that most big networks ignored: skateboarding, BMX bike riding, inline skating, street luge and more. Many of these were called action sports, sports built around tricks and style rather than balls and goals.

The event drew big television audiences, especially among teenagers. In 1996, ESPN renamed it the X Games and made it a yearly event. A Winter X Games for snowboarding and skiing followed in 1997. Skateboarding had been on national television before, at the 1965 championships in Anaheim on ABC. Now it was on every year, and TV deals carried it to many countries.

Television changed skateboarding in two directions. Pro skaters gained prize money, fame and sponsors outside the skate world. Some skaters worried that a big TV company would shape the sport for advertisers. Both sides were right in part, and that debate about money and independence has lasted ever since.

Skateboarding has no goals or finish line, so judges decide who wins. In a typical run, a skater has a short set time, often under a minute, to skate a ramp or course. Judges watch and give a score. A run with a fall usually scores lower, because landing cleanly is part of the trick.

Judges look for several things at once. Difficulty means how hard the tricks are. Variety means using many different tricks and parts of the course. On a vert ramp, height above the edge counts too. Flow, the way one trick leads smoothly into the next, also matters. Scores from several judges are usually combined so one judge’s opinion does not decide the winner alone.

A Best Trick contest works differently. Each skater gets a set time to try one hard trick as many times as they can. Only landed tricks count, and the hardest one landed wins. Best Trick rewards persistence, because a skater may fall many times before a single success.

Tony Hawk grew up in California and turned professional as a young teenager. In the 1980s he rode for Powell Peralta’s Bones Brigade team and won many vert contests. He invented dozens of tricks on vert. For years he had tried a spin that no one had landed in a contest: the 900.

Spins are named by degrees. One full turn is 360 degrees, so a 540 is one and a half turns and a 720 is two turns. A 900 is two and a half turns, 900 degrees. On a vert ramp, the skater must spin those turns in the air, then land rolling back down the transition, the curved part of the ramp.

At the 1999 X Games in San Francisco, Hawk tried the 900 in the Best Trick contest. He fell again and again. The time limit passed, and he kept going. Then he landed it and rode away. The moment was shown on television and replayed for years, and it made him the most famous skater in the world.

A spin can only happen while the skater is in the air. Airtime depends on how high the skater rises above the ramp’s edge. If a skater rises straight up a height h and falls back, the airtime is t = 2√(2h/g), with g = 9.8 m/s². Higher airs give more time to turn.

Here is a worked example, not measured from a real run. Say a skater rises h = 1.5 m above the edge. First, 2h = 2 × 1.5 = 3.0. Next, 3.0 ÷ 9.8 = 0.306. The square root of 0.306 is about 0.553. Doubling gives t ≈ 1.11 s. To spin 900 degrees in 1.11 s, the skater needs 900 ÷ 1.11 ≈ 811 degrees per second. That is 2.5 ÷ 1.11 ≈ 2.25 turns every second.

Skaters start the spin before leaving the ramp by winding up the shoulders and arms. Once in the air, no outside push can add more spin. This idea is called conservation of angular momentum. But a skater can spin faster by pulling the arms and knees in close to the body. Spreading out again slows the spin before landing.

The 900 showed that a trick once called impossible could be done. Other skaters later landed 900s too. In 2012, a 12-year-old named Tom Schaar landed the first 1080, three full turns, on a very large ramp. Each new record built on what earlier skaters had shown was possible.

In the 2000s, pro skater Danny Way helped design the mega ramp. It is far larger than a vert ramp, with a long roll-in and a huge gap. In 2005, he jumped over the Great Wall of China on a mega ramp built for the jump. The X Games added a Big Air event on a mega ramp in the 2000s.

These feats use huge speeds and heights. Pros train for years, wear full pads and helmets, and still get badly hurt. They are shown here to explain the history, not as goals for learners. A learner’s first spin is a small 180 on flat ground or a kickturn on a low ramp, with a helmet, pads and a smooth, quiet spot.

In 1999, the same year as the 900, the video game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater came out. Players chose a real pro and skated through levels built like schoolyards, warehouses and plazas. They earned points by linking tricks. The game sold millions of copies and had sequels for years.

The game taught a vocabulary. Players learned names like kickflip, heelflip, 50-50 grind, boardslide and manual. Many players who had never stepped on a board could name a dozen tricks. Some then bought a real board. The game’s soundtrack also mixed punk and hip-hop, the music of many skate videos, and introduced bands to new fans.

Elissa Steamer was the first woman skater in the game. Game physics are not real physics, though. On screen, a skater can grind for a whole block or spin huge airs with no gear. In real life, friction slows a grind within a few meters, and gravity limits airtime. A real skater learns each trick slowly, falling small and building up.

Television, the 900 and the video game came together around 1999. Skateboarding grew into a large industry, a group of businesses that make and sell the same kind of product. Skate shoes and clothing sold far beyond skate shops. Big sports companies started skate lines of their own. Skate style showed up in music videos and advertising.

The boom brought money to pros and companies. Some skaters earned a living through signature shoes and boards, products sold under a skater’s name. Others felt the sport was being commercialized, turned into a product for sale. Skaters argued about whether a big company could be part of skateboarding without changing it.

The boom also built places to skate. In 2002, Tony Hawk started the Tony Hawk Foundation to help communities build free public skateparks, often in low-income neighborhoods. It was renamed The Skatepark Project in 2020. More public parks meant that kids banned from plazas had somewhere legal and safe to ride.

Women have skated since the sidewalk-surfing days. Magazines, companies and contests often gave them less room. Patti McGee was the women’s national champion in 1965. That year she appeared on the cover of Life magazine doing a handstand on a moving skateboard. She was one of the first skaters of any kind to reach a national audience.

Peggy Oki was the only woman on the Zephyr team from Santa Monica and Venice. She skated with Tony Alva, Jay Adams and Stacy Peralta at the Del Mar Nationals in 1975. Her low, surf-style turns matched the team’s aggressive style. She later became an artist and an activist for the ocean and its animals.

Cindy Whitehead was a top pool and ramp skater in the late 1970s. Few women rode those big walls then. Decades later she started a project called Girl Is NOT a 4 Letter Word to support and photograph women skaters. These women skated with little prize money and few sponsors. They kept a door open for those who came after.

Elissa Steamer grew up in Florida and became a professional street skater in the 1990s. She had a full part in Toy Machine’s 1996 video Welcome to Hell, skating the same streets and ledges as the men on her team. In the late 1990s, few women had pro boards with their names on them. Steamer was one of the first.

When the X Games added women’s skateboarding events in the early 2000s, Steamer won several medals. But women often earned far less prize money, the cash paid to contest winners, than men in the same events. Some contests also gave women less time, worse slots or no TV coverage at all.

Women skaters organized to change that. In the 2000s, pros including Cara-Beth Burnside and Mimi Knoop formed a group that pressed contest organizers for fair treatment. By the end of that decade, the X Games paid women and men the same prize money. Equal pay in skateboarding came from skaters speaking up together.

Skateboarding’s story is often told through a few famous white Californians, but skaters of color helped shape it from early on. Tony Alva, of Mexican American heritage, was one of the Zephyr team’s best-known riders in the 1970s. He skated empty pools in a fast, aggressive style and later ran his own board company.

In the late 1980s, Ray Barbee rode for Powell Peralta’s Bones Brigade. He was known for smooth, creative flat-ground street skating, including the no-comply, a trick in which the front foot steps off and the back foot pops the board. He is also a guitarist. In the 1990s, Stevie Williams came up skating the ledges of LOVE Park in Philadelphia, and in 2002 he started the company DGK.

Daewon Song, a Korean American skater, became famous in the 1990s for long manual combinations and inventive technical tricks. Skaters like these often started where there were no parks, on city ledges and parking lots. Their success helped show that skateboarding belongs to every neighborhood, not one beach town.

Skateparks are not only for skateboards. Aaron Fotheringham rides a wheelchair in skateparks, dropping into bowls and flying out of ramps. In the mid-2000s he landed the first wheelchair backflip, a full flip backward in the air. His sport is called WCMX, short for wheelchair motocross, and riders now hold their own contests.

Adaptive skaters showed that the ramps and bowls built for boards could work for other bodies too. Adaptive sport means a sport changed so that people with different bodies can take part. Many parks now host adaptive sessions, where wheelchair riders and skaters share the space.

In 2007, Oliver Percovich, an Australian skater, founded Skateistan in Kabul, Afghanistan. It mixed skateboarding with school lessons, and many of its students were girls, at a time when girls there had few chances to play sports. Skateistan later opened schools in other countries. By the 2000s, skateboarding had become a world sport, years before the Olympics added it.