The Olympics has incorporated a once-rebellious sport known for iconoclasts, free spirits and free wheelers into its more disciplined qualification and competition pathway.
“But there is still quite a bit of freedom in our sport,” said skateboarder Shay Sandiford of Courtenay.
Boarders Sandiford, Samantha Secours and Adam Hopkins from the Canadian national team are in Greater Victoria this week to try out the several bowls in the region, including at Vic West and Topaz parks and on the West Shore.
sa国际传媒 Skateboard is exploring options for a national home base and national team camps and also toured PISE and is being hosted this week by 94 Forward, the legacy fund from the 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games.
Several national sporting organizations such as Rowing sa国际传媒, Rugby sa国际传媒 and Triathlon sa国际传媒 are headquartered on the Island with others such as Athletics sa国际传媒, Cycling sa国际传媒 and Golf sa国际传媒 having components of their national programs located here.
“It’s the multi-sport presence, and the overall built-in support structures, that makes Victoria so attractive,” said Higgins.
The ultimate destination is the 2024 Olympics venue, Place de La Concorde in the heart of Paris, next summer after skateboarding made its debut at the last Olympics in Tokyo.
“We are working hard on qualifying our athletes for the Olympic Games in Paris,” said Canadian team head coach Sean Hayes, who will also guide the athletes this fall at the 2023 Pan Am Games in Santiago, Chile.
Secours, however, said skateboarders can toggle between the button-downed qualification/competition mode and the pure-joy-of-boarding feeling that brought them to the sport in the first place.
“You can go from training to just-hanging-out boarding quite easily,” said the 21-year-old from Montreal.
“We can’t lose that from our sport.”
Thunder Bay’s Hopkins, also bound for the Pan Am Games in Santiago with Secours, said: “There are no borders and no boundaries in skateboarding. Skateboarders are one big family wherever you go and whatever language you speak.”
That ethic was on display, with the shows of solidarity by all the Olympic boarders competing in Tokyo to even lowly also-rans, much commented on.
“There’s definitely been a spike in media attention, and we’ve seen a lot more people buying skateboards, since the Tokyo Olympics,” said sa国际传媒 Skateboard high-performance director Adam Higgins.
Also, counterintuitively, while most sports suffered due to the pandemic, skateboarding found growth.
“It is such an individual sport that you could just go out to a parking lot by yourself during the pandemic,” said Sandiford, the G.P. Vanier Secondary graduate, who learned many of his moves on a plywood ramp built by his dad in the backyard of the family home in Courtenay.
