99 Fun Facts About Skate

What did Californian surfers originally call skateboarding?

Sidewalk surfing: surfers took it up as something to ride when the waves were flat, and carried their surfing moves over to the pavement.

What were the very first skateboards made from?

Boxes or boards with roller-skate wheels: children first nailed the wheels of old skates under a plank with a crate on the front as a scooter, and the skateboard was what was left when the crate came off.

In the early 1970s Frank Nasworthy revived skateboarding by developing wheels made from what material?

Polyurethane gripped the road where the old clay and steel wheels skidded; he named his company Cadillac Wheels after the smooth ride, and the sport's 1970s comeback followed.

A 1976 California drought helped launch "vert" skating because skaters started riding what?

Empty swimming pools: households drained them to save water, and skaters who hopped the fences found that the curved concrete walls let them ride up to vertical and into the air.

The Z-Boys skate team was sponsored by a surf shop in which California beach town?

Santa Monica: the shop stood at the rundown southern end of town, in a strip the locals called Dogtown that its co-owner remembered as a seaside slum, nothing like ritzy Malibu up the coast.

Which future filmmaker was a member of the Z-Boys alongside Tony Alva and Jay Adams?

Stacy Peralta went on to co-found the board company Powell Peralta, then told his old team's story himself by directing the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys.

Which skateboarding trick is widely said to take its name from the nickname of its inventor, Alan Gelfand?

The ollie: Gelfand went by 'Ollie' as a Florida teenager, and most dictionaries trace the word to him; the no-hands leap he worked out in a Florida skatepark became the root of most modern tricks.

What is a skateboarder's stance called when the right foot leads and the left foot pushes?

Goofy: leading with the left foot is simply called regular, and riding in whichever stance is not your own is called switch, which turns even a basic trick into a harder one.

Rodney Mullen's 1982 trick, first nicknamed the "magic flip" because rivals couldn't work out how he did it, is now called what?

The kickflip spins the board a full turn along its length beneath the rider's feet; Mullen devised it in the same run of inventions as the heelflip, and they became the building blocks of street skating.

Which 1985 blockbuster is often credited with reviving skateboarding?

Back to the Future: its co-writer says the film gave skateboarding a renaissance, and two professional skaters were hired to choreograph Marty McFly's skateboard scenes and coach the cast.

Which trick did Tony Hawk land for the first time at the 1999 X Games, after regulation time had already run out?

The 900 is two and a half mid-air turns; the announcers let him keep trying past the time limit until he rode one out, and he landed it again 17 years later to the day, aged 48.

What is the name of Tony Hawk's skateboard company?

Birdhouse: Hawk, nicknamed Birdman, started it with fellow professional Per Welinder in 1992, and has said it was his way of moving on from being a pro skater to being a company owner.

Which professional skateboarder became a household name as one of the stars of MTV's Jackass?

Bam Margera was shooting home-made skate, stunt and prank videos with friends in Pennsylvania when the show's makers folded his crew into Jackass, which itself grew out of a skateboarding magazine.

Which skateboarder turned MTV star founded the Street League Skateboarding contest series in 2010?

Rob Dyrdek, already famous from MTV's Rob & Big and Fantasy Factory, launched the league because he was unhappy with how street contests were run, and it grew to offer the biggest prize money the sport had seen.

Which studio developed the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, released in 1999?

Neversoft was then best known for Apocalypse, a shooter starring Bruce Willis, and it reworked that game's engine into a skateboarding game.

The Skate video game series is known for what trick-control system?

Flick-it has players do tricks with quick flicks of the analog sticks rather than by tapping out combinations, which is what set the series apart from earlier skateboarding games.

Where were the inaugural X Games held in the summer of 1995?

Rhode Island: the first edition, held around Newport and Providence, was billed as the Extreme Games, with bungee jumping and skysurfing on the programme, and it took its shorter name the following year.

Which network founded the X Games?

ESPN launched the event in 1995 and staged it for 27 years before selling a controlling stake to a private equity firm in 2022.

Thrasher magazine was founded in 1981 mainly to promote which hardware brand its founders already owned?

Independent was three years old when its owners started the magazine as a platform for their products, under the motto 'skate and destroy', and Thrasher went on to re-energise the sport.

Most skateboard decks are pressed from thin layers of which wood?

Maple: a standard deck is seven or eight thin sheets of it glued and pressed together, a recipe makers settled on in the 1970s after trying fibreglass and aluminium.

What are the metal parts called that hold a skateboard's wheels to the deck?

Trucks are pivoting metal axle assemblies bolted under the deck, and a better-turning design launched in 1978 let skaters attempt a much wider range of tricks.

Skateboarding made its Olympic debut at which Games?

Tokyo 2020, held a year late in 2021, put skateboarding on the programme for the first time, and the first women's street final produced the youngest podium in Olympic history: two 13-year-olds and a 16-year-old.

Which landmark did skateboarder Danny Way clear in 2005 by launching off a giant purpose-built ramp?

The Great Wall of China: Way cleared it from a megaramp, the outsize ramp he had devised himself and had brought to the X Games the year before as its Big Air contest.

In The Simpsons' opening credits, Bart's skateboard ride ends with a bounce off the roof of what?

Homer's car: Bart bursts out of the school doors on his board, weaves through Springfield and bounces off the car's roof in the driveway as the family races for the couch.

Sky Brown became Great Britain's youngest-ever Olympic medallist at 13 by winning which medal?

Bronze in park: she fell on her first two runs in the final and landed the same trick on her last, a year after a training crash had fractured her skull.

Which American street skater, a multiple world champion, finally won his first Olympic medal at Paris 2024?

Nyjah Huston had gone to his first Games as the gold-medal favourite and finished seventh; in Paris he reached the podium behind Japan's Yuto Horigome and his own team-mate.

What is the rough, sandpaper-like sheet stuck to the top of a skateboard deck called?

Grip tape is an adhesive sheet coated with hard grit; without its friction against the soles of the shoes, a skater could hardly get the board off the ground.

Which surf-pop duo turned the Beach Boys' "Catch a Wave" into a 1964 hit about skateboarding?

Jan and Dean wanted a song about a new sport, so they asked Brian Wilson himself to help put skateboard words to his tune, and the single reached the American top 30.

Which Canadian singer had a 2002 hit with "Sk8er Boi", about a girl who snubs a skateboarder?

Avril Lavigne's song is about a girl who turns a boy down because he is a skateboarder and lives to regret it; it reached the top ten in both the United States and Britain.

Which ice-dance pair earned twelve perfect 6.0s for a routine set to Ravel's "Boléro" at the 1984 Winter Olympics?

Torvill and Dean, a pair from Nottingham, got a 6.0 for artistic impression from every judge, and the actor Michael Crawford, who had taught them how to act, was cheering at the rinkside.

Which skater won a shock 2002 Olympic short-track gold when all four of his rivals fell at the final corner?

Steven Bradbury was so far behind that he missed the pile-up and glided past to give Australia its first Winter Olympic gold, and 'doing a Bradbury' entered Australian slang for an unlikely win.

What is the ice-resurfacing machine at skating rinks commonly called, after the Californian rink owner who invented it?

Zamboni: when home refrigerators shrank the market for the block ice he sold, Frank Zamboni used his plant's equipment to open a skating rink, then built a machine to speed up resurfacing it.

Which actor played Skip Engblom, co-owner of the Zephyr surf shop, in the 2005 film Lords of Dogtown?

Heath Ledger played the surf-shop owner who sponsored a gang of local kids as a skate team, in a film scripted by one of the real skaters it portrays.

Which people do researchers think were the first to ice skate, gliding on animal bones across their land's many frozen lakes?

The Finns: the researchers skated on replicas of museum bone skates, then calculated that the blades saved a traveller far more energy in lake-strewn southern Finland than anywhere else in northern Europe.

Which city's Summer Games introduced figure skating to the Olympics, 16 years before the first Winter Olympics?

London, in 1908: the skaters competed in late October at a rink in Knightsbridge, and two of the four events drew so few entrants that everyone in them went home with a medal.

Which figure skater won three straight Olympic golds, then became a Hollywood star?

Sonja Henie won in 1928, 1932 and 1936, then staged her own ice show in Hollywood to catch the eye of studio chief Darryl Zanuck, and held out until he agreed to give her starring roles.

Who was the first figure skater to land a clean quadruple Axel in international competition?

Ilia Malinin landed it in September 2022, aged 17; the Axel is the only jump that takes off facing forwards, which adds an extra half-turn and made its quadruple the last to be conquered.

Which American skater landed the first double Axel in competition on his way to an Olympic gold medal?

Dick Button had never landed the jump until a practice session days before the 1948 final and put it in anyway; four years later he won again with the first triple jump seen in competition.

Which 2009 film, directed by Drew Barrymore, follows a Texas teenager who joins a roller derby team?

Whip It was written by Shauna Cross, a Los Angeles Derby Dolls skater, from her own novel, and real derby players were cast alongside actors who did almost all their own skating.

In roller derby, what is the scoring player on each team called?

The jammer wears a star on the helmet and scores a point for each opposing blocker lapped; the first one through the pack can end the jam at any moment by putting hands on hips.

Which Andrew Lloyd Webber musical has its cast perform on roller skates?

Starlight Express: its cast play racing railway engines, and the show grew out of Lloyd Webber's abandoned 1970s plan to turn Thomas the Tank Engine into a television cartoon.

The brothers behind Rollerblade, from Minneapolis, built their early inline skates by fitting wheels to the boots of which sport?

Ice hockey: the Olson brothers, both hockey enthusiasts, bolted inline wheels on to old hockey boots, and the brand they started sold so well that its name became the everyday word for inline skates.

John Joseph Merlin is said to have crashed his new roller skates into a mirror at an 18th-century masquerade while playing what?

A violin: with no means of slowing or steering his skates, Merlin is said to have sailed into a costly mirror, smashing it and the instrument and badly injuring himself.

A long-track speed skating lap matches a lap of which track?

Outdoor running track: both ovals are 400 metres round, and because the inside lane is shorter, the two skaters in each race must swap lanes on the back straight every lap.

The Elfstedentocht, a roughly 200-kilometre skating race over frozen canals and lakes linking eleven cities, is held in which country?

The Netherlands: the race through Friesland runs only in winters cold enough to freeze the whole course, and after the brutal 1963 edition, which fewer than one starter in a hundred finished, 22 years passed before the next.

Which speed skater won all five men's events at the 1980 Winter Olympics, from 500 to 10,000 metres?

Eric Heiden swept every distance from the sprint to the 10,000 metres, then quit skating to become a professional cyclist who rode the Tour de France, and later qualified as an orthopaedic surgeon.

Which country banned the sale and use of skateboards from 1978 to 1989 over injury fears?

Norway: the ban was meant to protect children from what officials saw as a dangerous toy, and the few skaters who kept going rode in secret on home-made ramps hidden in the woods.

Which skate shoe brand, founded in California in 1966, is known for its checkerboard slip-ons?

Vans went national after Sean Penn wore its checkerboard slip-ons as the surfer Jeff Spicoli in the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which carried the shoes out of California and into department stores.

Patti McGee, the first woman to turn professional as a skateboarder, made the cover of which picture magazine in 1965?

Life put her on its cover doing her trademark handstand on a board; then 19, she was touring America giving demonstrations for a board maker, and she went on to appear with Johnny Carson.

Tillman, who set a Guinness record for the fastest 100 metres on a skateboard, was what animal?

An English bulldog nicknamed Pot Roast, Tillman also appeared on the TV contest Greatest American Dog and rode a Rose Parade float.

The game of SKATE, where each missed trick earns a letter, copies which basketball game?

Horse supplied the format: one rider sets a trick, the rest must match it on the first try, and five misses spell the word and put a player out.

Which 2000s sitcom star was a pro skateboarder who co-founded Stereo Skateboards before acting?

Jason Lee swapped his board for the screen and earned two Golden Globe nominations as the lead in My Name Is Earl.

Which actor made his directing debut with Mid90s, about a boy who joins a Los Angeles skate crew?

Jonah Hill wrote and directed Mid90s as a passion project, drawing on his own experiences growing up in Los Angeles in the 1990s.

Which streetwear label with a red box logo began as a Manhattan store laid out for skateboarders?

Supreme gave its first store, opened on Lafayette Street in 1994, a layout that left room for skateboarding, with the clothes arranged around the perimeter.

Which Olympic snowboard champion, mentored by Tony Hawk, also won X Games skateboarding gold?

Shaun White turned pro on a skateboard at 16 and became the first athlete to compete in and win both the Summer and Winter X Games in two different sports.

Skateistan, subject of an Oscar-winning short film, first taught girls to skate in which country?

Afghanistan is where skater Oliver Percovich arrived in 2007 with three boards and began skating in the streets of Kabul with local children.

Tech Deck is a popular brand of miniature skateboards that riders steer and flip using what?

Their fingers stand in for feet on the 96-millimetre boards, a pastime Lance Mountain showed to skaters everywhere in a 1985 skate video.

Which actor played a teenage skateboarder turned amateur detective in 1989's Gleaming the Cube?

Christian Slater shared the screen with the real thing: Tony Hawk appears in the film as one of the skateboarders.

What is the U-shaped ramp with two facing curved walls, used in vert skateboarding, called?

A half-pipe is really two quarter-pipes facing each other across a flat bottom, and skaters share the design with snowboarders, BMX riders and freestyle skiers.

Which Oscar-winning actor narrated the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys about a 1970s skate team?

Sean Penn narrates the story of how Southern California's surf culture shaped a new style of skateboarding in the district nicknamed Dogtown.

San Diego-born Keegan Palmer won two straight Olympic park golds skating for which country?

Australia became home when his family moved to the Gold Coast when he was one; his father is American and his mother South African.

Which rapper's 2006 debut single Kick, Push tells a love story about a pair of misfit skateboarders?

Lupe Fiasco wrote Kick, Push with producer Soundtrakk as the first single from his album Food & Liquor.

Which actor starred as a young skateboarder training for a downhill race in the 1986 film Thrashin'?

Josh Brolin took the lead in a film whose producer turned down Johnny Depp, then the boyfriend of cast member Sherilyn Fenn.

Which film director shot the skate video Video Days and later co-founded Girl Skateboards?

Spike Jonze started Girl in 1993 with riders Rick Howard and Mike Carroll, years before he directed Being John Malkovich and Her.

Which US city's LOVE Park became a world-famous street skating spot despite decades of bans?

Philadelphia first banned skating in the plaza in 1984 and police were issuing $300 fines by the early 1990s, yet skate videos kept making the spot more famous.

Which city's waterfront plaza, known to skaters as EMB, was a hub of street skating around 1990?

San Francisco's Embarcadero Plaza became a world-renowned destination in the late 1980s, just as modern street skating was on the rise.

Rayssa Leal, who went viral aged seven skating in a tutu, is known by what nickname?

The Little Fairy, Fadinha in Portuguese, had her clip reposted by Tony Hawk and went on to win an Olympic silver medal at just 13.

Penny boards, the short, narrow cruisers that took off in 2010, have decks made of what material?

Plastic boards first appeared in the 1970s, when Larry Stevenson launched a line for his Makaha brand, but the Penny name became shorthand for all of them.

What do skaters call someone who copies the clothes and carries a board without sharing the culture?

A poser, or poseur in the older spelling, even became a video game character: Poseur Pete is the beginner-level opponent in Electronic Arts' Skate or Die!

What do skaters call rolling backwards while keeping the feet in their normal stance?

Fakie lends its name to a whole family of tricks, among them the Caballerial, a full 360-degree aerial turn begun while rolling backwards.

What is the slang term for pushing a skateboard along with the front foot instead of the back?

Mongo pushing keeps the rear foot planted on the board while the leading one does the work, the reverse of the usual technique.

What do skaters call rolling along on only the two rear wheels without the tail touching down?

A manual can be held on the front two wheels as well, and it was among the most common tricks in the flat-ground freestyle skating of the 1970s.

What is the narrow metal rod running along the top edge of a skate ramp or bowl called?

The coping sits where the curved wall meets the platform, giving skaters a hard edge to lock onto for lip tricks.

Loose bushings make a skateboard easier to turn but raise the risk of which board-stopping problem?

Wheel bite happens when the deck leans far enough to touch a spinning wheel, which damages the wood and can stop the ride dead.

What property of a skateboard wheel is given by its durometer rating, a number that runs up to 100?

Hardness shapes the ride: soft wheels rate about 85 on the durometer scale, while hard wheels come in at 98 or higher.

ABEC ratings, which run in odd numbers from 1 to 9, grade the precision of which skateboard part?

Bearings let each wheel turn smoothly on its axle, and an ABEC 9 rating marks the strictest manufacturing tolerance.

What is the large bolt called that joins the hanger to the baseplate and lets a skateboard turn?

The kingpin doubles as the steering adjustment: tightening it makes a board turn more stiffly, and loosening it makes the ride more responsive.

What do skaters call travelling along a rail or ledge on the metal axles rather than the deck?

A grind scrapes along on the metal hardware, while a slide uses the underside of the board; the first ones were done on parking blocks and curbs.

What do skaters mockingly call a newcomer's way of carrying a board like a fashion accessory?

The mall grab made the New York Times in 2007, when skaters told the paper it marked out first-timers drawn in by pop choruses and bright sneakers.

In 2009 Tony Hawk became the first person allowed to skateboard on the grounds of which building?

The White House invited him to a Father's Day celebration hosted by Barack Obama, and he rolled through the hallways of the Old Executive Office Building next door.

Which 1999 Nickelodeon cartoon followed four young friends who skateboard and surf in Ocean Shores?

Rocket Power ran until 2004 and centred on Otto, Reggie, Twister and Sam, who hung out at the Shore Shack, a burger joint and surf rental shop.

Which Marvel superhero is a playable skater in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, thanks to a licensing deal?

Spider-Man joined a roster of real professional skateboarders, alongside four unlockable original characters.

Which 1985 Nike basketball shoe was reworked in 2002 to launch the brand's SB skate line?

The Dunk was first sold in the colours of university basketball teams, and its popularity with skaters led Nike to rebuild it with a padded tongue and collar.

Which publisher, spotting a growing market for skateboarding games, released Tony Hawk's Pro Skater?

Activision first handed the project to a different studio, whose attempt failed to impress and never got past the concept stage.

Which Paris square, where Louis XVI was executed in 1793, hosted skateboarding at the 2024 Olympics?

Place de la Concorde staged the contests from 28 July to 7 August, only the second time the sport had appeared on the Olympic programme.

The plaza outside the MACBA art museum is one of skating's most iconic street spots in which city?

Barcelona's Museum of Contemporary Art has a forecourt so well known to skaters that a 3D model of it appears in a smartphone skating game.

In 2012, 12-year-old Tom Schaar became the first skateboarder ever to land which aerial spin?

The 1080 came on Schaar's fifth attempt, and he soon repeated it in competition to win gold at the Asia X Games in Shanghai.

Which skate footwear brand was co-founded in 1994 by Ken Block, later a star rally driver?

DC Shoes was started with Damon Way and Clayton Blehm, and after selling his stake Block turned to cars with his Hoonigan brand.

Tony Hawk and Steve Caballero rode for which famous 1980s team, seen skating in Police Academy 4?

The Bones Brigade was formed in 1979, and its videos became some of the most influential skate films of the era.

Which skate magazine, founded by Steve Rocco in 1992, is credited with spawning MTV's Jackass?

Big Brother mixed skating with stunts and pranks in its videos, and early writer Jeff Tremaine later recalled the link on the TV show itself.

Which punk band's song Superman became an anthem of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games?

Goldfinger's track is so bound up with the series that a later documentary about the games took its title from the song.

Surf City, the world's first skatepark, opened in 1965 in which landlocked US state?

Arizona got there first: Surf City opened on Speedway in Tucson on September 3, 1965, and offered its customers concrete ramps.

Burnside Skatepark, built by skaters without permission beneath a bridge in 1990, is in which city?

Portland later accepted the do-it-yourself concrete as a public skatepark, and it went on to appear in the film Free Willy.

Which veteran skated for Great Britain, his father's homeland, at the Paris 2024 Olympics aged 51?

Andy Macdonald announced the plan in 2022 and qualified in June 2024, becoming the oldest skateboarder the Olympics had seen.

Which 1980s vert skater, Tony Hawk's great rival, invented the Rocket Air and was nicknamed Holmes?

Christian Hosoi was invited to the first X Games, where organisers planned to market a renewed duel between the two, but he declined.

Mark Gonzales named his new skateboard company Blind as a deliberate jab at which former sponsor?

Vision Skateboards had backed Gonzales before he set up on his own under the umbrella of Steve Rocco's World Industries.

Mike McGill first landed his McTwist, an inverted 540 aerial, on a ramp in which European country?

Sweden saw it first, at Rättvik in 1984; McGill was inspired by a 540 done on roller skates, and Lester Kasai became the second skater to land one.

Street skater Paul Rodriguez, known as P-Rod, shares a name with his father, a famous what?

A comedian and actor, the elder Paul Rodriguez moved in show-business circles, so his son occasionally met celebrities as a child.

Skate shoe brand Etnies grew up in Southern California but was founded in 1986 in which country?

France gave the brand its start, and former professional skater Pierre André Sénizergues began designing its shoes shortly after the launch.