Unit 7 · Pools, Parks and the Ollie

Southern California has many backyard swimming pools. Many were built after World War II, when the area grew fast. Pools from that time often had rounded shapes, like a kidney bean or a figure eight. Their floors curved smoothly up into the walls. That curve is what drew skaters.

Some skaters were riding empty pools even before the 1970s. Then came the drought of 1976 and 1977. A drought is a long time with much less rain than normal. Water was scarce, so some owners drained their pools or left them empty. Skaters went looking for them. They called this pool riding.

Many of these skaters were surfers first. The Zephyr team from Santa Monica and Venice had shown a low, surf-style way to skate at the Del Mar Nationals in 1975. Its riders included Peggy Oki, Tony Alva, Jay Adams and Stacy Peralta. In pools, that style could climb walls. Skating an empty pool without the owner’s permission was trespassing, and that is part of this history too.

A pool gave skaters a new set of words. The flat floor at the bottom is the flat bottom. The curved part where the floor bends up into the wall is the transition, often called tranny for short. Above the transition, the wall can become straight up and down. Skaters call that part vert, short for vertical.

At the top of a pool wall is a band of tile. Above the tile is the coping. In a pool, coping is the rounded stone or concrete lip along the edge. Skaters learned to ride up until their wheels touched the tile. Later they rolled their back truck onto the coping and let it grind along the edge.

Pools also have a shallow end and a deep end. The deep end has the tallest walls, so it is where the biggest moves happen. The shallow end often has steps. Skaters used the steps to climb in and out. These same words, from transition to coping, are still used in every skatepark today.

In the 1960s, most skateboard wheels were made of clay or metal. They were hard and slippery. On a curved wall, they would skid out. In the early 1970s, Frank Nasworthy began selling wheels made of urethane, a tough, rubbery plastic. His company was called Cadillac Wheels.

Urethane wheels grip the ground much better than clay. They also roll over small cracks and pebbles instead of stopping short. That grip comes from friction, the force that pushes against sliding between two surfaces. With more grip, a skater could lean into a turn on a steep wall and the wheels would hold.

In the mid-1970s, sealed precision bearings came to skateboards. A bearing is a ring of small steel balls inside each wheel that lets the wheel spin smoothly on the axle. Sealed bearings kept out dirt and rolled with less loss. Together, grippy wheels and smooth bearings let skaters carry speed up the walls of a pool.

When a skater rolls into the curve of a pool, their path bends upward. Anything that moves in a curve needs a push toward the center of that curve. Here, the wall gives that push. It presses up on the wheels, which press on the rider’s feet. The change in direction toward the center of the curve is called centripetal acceleration.

Scientists find centripetal acceleration with a = v squared divided by r. Here v is speed and r is the radius, the distance from the center of the curve to the path. Here is a worked example. A skater moves at 6 meters per second through a curve with a 3-meter radius. First, 6 times 6 is 36. Next, 36 divided by 3 is 12. The answer is 12 meters per second squared.

Gravity pulls down at 9.8 meters per second squared. At the bottom of the curve, the floor must hold the rider up and also turn them. So the push adds up to 9.8 plus 12, or 21.8. That is about 2.2 times what the rider feels standing still. This is why pool skaters crouch low with bent knees at the bottom of a wall.

A skater at the top of a pool wall is high above the floor. Height stores energy, called potential energy. When the skater rolls down, that energy turns into kinetic energy, the energy of motion. The higher the start, the faster the skater moves at the bottom. Mass does not change the answer, so a small skater and a large skater reach about the same speed.

If nothing slowed the skater, the speed at the bottom would be v = the square root of 2 times g times h. Here g is 9.8 meters per second squared and h is the height. Here is a worked example for a 2-meter wall. First, 2 times 9.8 is 19.6. Next, 19.6 times 2 is 39.2. The square root of 39.2 is about 6.3. So the speed is about 6.3 meters per second.

Real skaters go a little slower. Friction in the wheels and bearings, and air pushing back, turn some energy into heat and sound. That is why a skater who just rolls back and forth climbs a little lower each time. To keep going, pool skaters learned to pump: crouching on the way into the curve and standing taller on the way up the wall adds energy.

As wheels and walls improved, skaters rode higher and higher. In the late 1970s, some began to fly past the coping and come back down onto the wall. This is called an air. To keep the board with them, they grabbed it with one hand. Who did the first one is argued. Tony Alva is often named among the first, and other skaters were trying airs too.

Skaters describe turns as frontside or backside. Skaters call it frontside when the skater’s chest and toes face the wall as they turn. It is backside when their back faces the wall. In a frontside air, the skater rides up the wall facing it, reaches down with the back hand, and grabs the toe-side edge of the board. Then the skater turns in the air and lands going back down the wall.

Physics explains the height. Say a skater leaves the coping moving straight up at 3 meters per second. The rise is v squared divided by 2g. First, 3 times 3 is 9. Next, 2 times 9.8 is 19.6. Then, 9 divided by 19.6 is about 0.46. The skater rises about 0.46 meters above the coping. Airs like this are for experienced riders in a skatepark, after years of smaller steps.

Pools were hard to find, and skating them often meant trespassing. Business owners saw a chance. Why not build places made just for skating? A skatepark is a place built for skateboarding, with ramps, bowls and curves. In 1976, two of the first opened on opposite coasts of the United States.

Carlsbad Skatepark opened in Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego. Skateboard City opened in Port Orange, Florida, near Daytona Beach. Both were built of poured concrete. Which one opened first is argued, so it is safest to say both opened in 1976. Florida also had warm weather all year and a strong surfing culture, like California.

Early parks copied what skaters loved about pools. Builders shaped concrete into bowls, deep rounded holes with curved walls. Some parks also had snake runs. A snake run is a long, winding downhill channel with curved banks, a bit like a dry riverbed. For the first time, skaters could ride curves legally and without hunting for an empty pool.

After 1976, skateparks spread quickly. By the late 1970s, dozens had opened across the United States, and parks appeared in other countries too. This fast growth is called a boom. It was skateboarding’s second boom, after the first one in the early 1960s faded around 1965 and 1966.

Most of these parks were private businesses. Skaters paid to ride, often for a session, a set block of time. Many parks had rules that riders wear a helmet and pads. Some rented gear at the front desk. Parks often held contests, and local skaters could watch better riders up close and learn from them.

Parks changed how skaters learned. A beginner could practice on a small, gentle bank before trying a tall bowl. A good progression starts small, with a helmet buckled and pads on, and moves up only when the smaller step feels easy. That idea, start low and build up, began in those first parks and still guides every skatepark today.

Before the internet, most skaters learned about new tricks from magazines. The most important one in the 1970s was SkateBoarder. It first appeared in the 1960s, stopped when the first boom faded, and came back in the mid-1970s. Each issue had big color photos of skaters in pools and parks.

Photos showed what words could not. A picture of a skater high on a pool wall told a kid in another state that it could be done. Writer and artist Craig Stecyk wrote about the Santa Monica and Venice skaters, an area called Dogtown. Those stories helped make Zephyr riders famous far from California.

Magazines also ran ads for boards, wheels and parks. Companies paid skaters to ride their products. These skaters were called pros, short for professionals. A young skater who wanted to see the newest tricks waited each month for the next issue to arrive.

Skaters fall, and sometimes they get hurt. When someone was hurt at a park, they or their family could sue the owner. A lawsuit is a case taken to court to ask for money for a harm. Even a park that won in court had to pay lawyers. Each lawsuit raised the risk of running a park.

Park owners bought insurance. Insurance is a plan where you pay a company regularly, and it pays big costs if something goes wrong. As claims grew, insurance companies charged park owners more, or refused to cover them. For many owners, the cost became more than the park earned.

Many parks closed in the early 1980s. Some were torn down. Others were filled with dirt and buried. At the same time, fewer people were buying skateboards, so parks had fewer paying riders. Losing the parks was a blow, but skaters did not stop. They found other places to ride.

With parks closing, skaters built their own places. Many built halfpipes out of wood in backyards. A halfpipe is a U-shaped ramp with two curved walls facing each other. Plywood bent over wooden frames made a smooth transition. Friends pooled money for lumber and built them together.

Other skaters rode what the city already had: curbs, banks, benches and empty parking lots. This became street skating, which grew in the 1980s. It needed new tricks, and the ollie on flat ground would soon give skaters a way to get up onto things without ramps.

Skateparks came back, but in a new form. Over time, more cities built public parks, owned by the town and often free to use. Some states changed their laws to protect cities from many lawsuits when skaters at public parks are hurt. Today a good first visit still means a helmet that fits and is buckled, wrist guards and pads, and starting on the smallest bank.

Alan Gelfand skated in Florida in the late 1970s. His friends called him Ollie. He found that he could pop his board into the air at the top of a transition without grabbing it. At the top of the wall, he stamped hard on the tail, the back end of the board that bends upward. The board lifted, and he lifted with it.

Other skaters called the trick the ollie air, and later just the ollie. An ollie is a jump where the skater pops the tail and the board rises with their feet, with no hands. At first, the ollie was done only on ramps and in bowls. Many skaters saw it in magazine photos before they ever saw it in person.

The ollie depended on an older idea: the kicktail. That is the upturned tail of a board. Larry Stevenson’s patent for a kicktail was granted in 1971. Without a tail to push on, there is nothing for the back foot to snap. The kicktail made the kickturn possible, and later it made the ollie possible.

An ollie is a chain of forces. First, the back foot snaps the tail down hard. The tail hits the ground. By Newton's third law, when one thing pushes on another, the second pushes back just as hard in the opposite direction. So the ground pushes up on the tail, and the board starts to rise.

The board also acts as a lever. A lever is a stiff bar that turns around a point called a pivot. Here the pivot is the back wheels. When the tail goes down, the nose swings up. The turning effect is called torque, found by force times the distance from the pivot. Here is a worked example. A back foot pushes with 500 newtons, 0.15 meters from the back wheels. 500 times 0.15 is 75, so the torque is 75 newton-meters.

Now the board is tilted, nose high. The front foot slides up toward the nose. Grip tape is rough, so friction lets the shoe drag the board upward. The front foot then pushes the nose forward and down until the board is level. The rider jumps at the same time and pulls the knees up, so the board has room to rise.

Once a skater leaves the ground, gravity takes over. The skater rises, slows, stops at the top, and falls back. The time from takeoff to landing is called hang time. The path of the skater’s middle traces a smooth arch called a parabola. A higher jump means a longer hang time.

There is a formula for hang time. If h is the jump height, the time is 2 times the square root of 2h divided by g. Here is a worked example for a 0.30-meter ollie. First, 2 times 0.30 is 0.60. Next, 0.60 divided by 9.8 is about 0.061. The square root of 0.061 is about 0.247. Last, 2 times 0.247 is about 0.49. The rider is in the air about half a second.

Half a second is very short. In that time the front foot has to drag the board level and both feet have to come back over the bolts. That is why skaters practice the same motion many times. The landing matters too. Bending the knees on landing spreads the stop over more time, which makes the force on the legs smaller.

In the 1970s and 1980s, one kind of contest needed no ramp at all. It was called freestyle. Freestyle skaters did tricks on smooth flat ground, one after another, in a routine set to music. They spun on the back wheels, stood the board on its end, and flipped it with their feet. Judges scored the whole routine.

Rodney Mullen grew up in Florida. As a teenager he won freestyle contests again and again, and he kept inventing new tricks. He rode for Powell Peralta, one of the biggest skateboard companies of the 1980s. Freestyle taught him to control a board with tiny movements of his feet.

Freestyle boards were often smaller and lighter than ramp boards. They had a tail and a nose to stand on and spin. Freestyle contests faded by the end of the 1980s, but the control they built did not. Many of today’s flat-ground tricks began as freestyle tricks.

Gelfand’s ollie happened at the top of a ramp wall. In the early 1980s, Rodney Mullen found a way to do it on flat ground, meaning level pavement with no ramp. He snapped the tail, slid his front foot up, and the board rose off the floor with his feet. Skaters had never seen a board jump from flat ground with no hands.

This changed what a skater could do. With a flat-ground ollie, a skater could hop up onto a curb, over a crack or onto a low ledge without stopping. It turned the whole street into terrain. In skating, terrain is any surface or object a skater rides, from a bowl wall to a curb.

Learning it still takes many steps. First, a skater practices standing still on grass or carpet, where the board cannot roll away. Next, they try it rolling slowly on smooth, flat ground with a helmet buckled and pads on. Only after many clean landings do they try to ollie up onto something low, such as a painted curb.

Once the board could jump from flat ground, Mullen began to spin and flip it in the air. His best-known invention is the kickflip as skaters do it today. In a kickflip, the skater ollies, and the front foot flicks off the toe-side edge of the nose. The board flips over along its long side, then the feet catch it and land.

Skaters had flipped boards in other ways before, but Mullen’s version starts from an ollie. He also invented the heelflip. In a heelflip, the front foot flicks off the heel-side edge with the heel, and the board flips the other way. Mixing a flip with a spin led to the 360 flip, also credited to Mullen.

A flip trick is called a flip trick because the board turns over under the skater. These tricks look like magic, but they follow the same rules as the ollie. They are learned after a steady rolling ollie, first by practicing the flick standing still on grass. Landing with both feet over the bolts is the goal every time.

Powell Peralta was a skateboard company run by George Powell and Stacy Peralta. Peralta had skated with the Zephyr team in the 1970s. In the 1980s he built a team of young riders called the Bones Brigade. A skate team is a group of skaters a company sponsors to ride its products in contests, photos and videos.

The Bones Brigade included Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain, Tommy Guerrero and Rodney Mullen. Some rode vert ramps, some rode street and one rode freestyle. Tony Hawk joined as a young teenager and became one of the best-known skaters in the world.

The company’s boards had bold graphics, the pictures printed on the bottom of a deck. Artist Vernon Courtland Johnson drew many of them, often with skulls and bones. Kids could spot a Powell Peralta board across a parking lot. A board’s art became a way for a skater to show who they were.

In 1984, Powell Peralta released The Bones Brigade Video Show. It was a skate video, a film of skaters doing tricks, sold on tape. Families could play it at home on a VCR, a machine that played video tapes. Skaters watched it over and over.

A photo shows one frozen moment. A video shows the whole trick: the crouch, the pop, the landing. Skaters could pause, rewind and watch the feet. Powell Peralta made more videos, including Future Primitive in 1985 and The Search for Animal Chin in 1987. Videos became one of the main ways tricks spread.

Videos also made skaters famous in towns with no skatepark. A kid in a small town could study the best riders in the world without leaving home. Copies were passed from friend to friend. Later, in the 1990s, videos from many companies would take over this job.

When parks closed and sales fell in the early 1980s, skaters needed ways to stay connected. Two new magazines filled that need. Thrasher began in 1981 in San Francisco. TransWorld SKATEboarding began in 1983. Both covered vert ramps, backyard ramps and the new street skating.

Each issue, one printing of a magazine, carried photos, interviews and contest results. Many issues also printed sequence photos. A sequence is a row of photos taken quickly, one after another, showing each step of a trick. A skater could study a sequence like a set of instructions.

Magazines linked skaters in different places. A reader in Illinois could see what was happening in California or Florida that month. Ads listed skate shops and mail-order catalogs. For many skaters in the 1980s, the magazine and the video were the closest thing to a skatepark.

With concrete parks closing, skaters turned to wood. Friends and families built halfpipes in backyards and driveways. The frame was made of wooden ribs cut into a curve. Sheets of plywood were bent over the ribs to make a smooth transition. A metal pipe along the top edge served as coping.

Tall ramps with vert walls were used for big airs and contests. Many backyards had a mini ramp instead, a smaller halfpipe with no vertical part. On a mini ramp, a skater can learn to pump, kickturn and roll back and forth at low speed. At the top of each wall is the platform, a flat deck where skaters stand and wait their turn.

A safe ramp starts with a strong frame and smooth, tight plywood with no gaps or loose screws. Adults with building experience did, and still should, lead the work. Riders on any ramp wear a buckled helmet and pads. Taking turns on the platform keeps two skaters from crashing at the bottom.

By the mid-1980s, the ollie had opened up the street. Skaters such as Mark Gonzales and Natas Kaupas showed new ways to ride things found in towns. A curb could be ollied onto. A ledge, a long low block like the edge of a planter, could be ground along. A bank, a slanted wall of concrete, worked like a small ramp.

Street skating used what was already there, so anyone with a board could try it. Some skaters in videos also jumped down stairs and rode handrails. Those were advanced feats done by experienced riders, not things to try while learning. Many skaters also met trouble from guards and police, because skating in some public places was banned.

A safe way to start street skating is at a skatepark’s street section or on a painted curb in an empty lot, away from cars. First, practice the ollie rolling on flat ground. Next, ollie onto a curb only a few centimeters high. Then add a little height when landing feels easy. A buckled helmet and wrist guards go on every time.