49 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.