Skate Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Skate trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
47 free Skate trivia questions with answers. Skate trivia built for people who know the difference between a kickflip and a heelflip — and for anyone who wants to. Most of this quiz is skateboarding: how surfers invented "sidewalk surfing", the urethane wheel that saved the sport, the empty pools of the 1976 drought, the Z-Boys, Alan Gelfand's ollie, Rodney Mullen's flip tricks, Tony Hawk's 900 and the teenagers who won skateboarding's first Olympic medals. Because "skate" means more than one thing, the last stretch covers ice and roller skating too: bone skates from Finland, figure skating's Olympic debut, Sonja Henie, the Elfstedentocht, quad skates and roller derby. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against encyclopaedic and official sources, so the facts hold up at the skatepark or the pub quiz.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Californian surfers originally call skateboarding?
Sidewalk surfing
Sidewalk surfing: surfers took it up as something to ride when the waves were flat, and carried their surfing moves over to the pavement.
Q 02What were the very first skateboards made from?
Boxes or boards with roller-skate wheels
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.
Q 03In the early 1970s Frank Nasworthy revived skateboarding by developing wheels made from what material?
Polyurethane
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.
Q 04A 1976 California drought helped launch "vert" skating because skaters started riding what?
Empty swimming pools
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.
Q 05The Z-Boys skate team was sponsored by a surf shop in which California beach town?
Santa Monica
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.
Q 06Which future filmmaker was a member of the Z-Boys alongside Tony Alva and Jay Adams?
Stacy Peralta
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.
Q 07Which skateboarding trick is widely said to take its name from the nickname of its inventor, Alan Gelfand?
The ollie
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.
Q 08What is a skateboarder's stance called when the right foot leads and the left foot pushes?
Goofy
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.
Q 09Rodney 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
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.
Q 10Which 1985 blockbuster is often credited with reviving skateboarding?
Back to the Future
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.
Q 11Which trick did Tony Hawk land for the first time at the 1999 X Games, after regulation time had already run out?
The 900
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.
Q 12What is the name of Tony Hawk's skateboard company?
Birdhouse
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.
Q 13Which professional skateboarder became a household name as one of the stars of MTV's Jackass?
Bam Margera
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.
Q 21What are the metal parts called that hold a skateboard's wheels to the deck?
Trucks
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.
Q 22Skateboarding made its Olympic debut at which Games?
Tokyo 2020
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.
Q 23Which landmark did skateboarder Danny Way clear in 2005 by launching off a giant purpose-built ramp?
The Great Wall of China
Q 14Which skateboarder turned MTV star founded the Street League Skateboarding contest series in 2010?
Rob Dyrdek
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.
Q 15Which studio developed the original Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, released in 1999?
Neversoft
Neversoft was then best known for Apocalypse, a shooter starring Bruce Willis, and it reworked that game's engine into a skateboarding game.
Q 16The Skate video game series is known for what trick-control system?
Flick-it
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.
Q 17Where were the inaugural X Games held in the summer of 1995?
Rhode Island
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.
Q 18Which network founded the X Games?
ESPN
ESPN launched the event in 1995 and staged it for 27 years before selling a controlling stake to a private equity firm in 2022.
Q 19Thrasher magazine was founded in 1981 mainly to promote which hardware brand its founders already owned?
Independent
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.
Q 20Most skateboard decks are pressed from thin layers of which wood?
Maple
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.
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.
Q 24In The Simpsons' opening credits, Bart's skateboard ride ends with a bounce off the roof of what?
Homer's car
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.
Q 25Sky Brown became Great Britain's youngest-ever Olympic medallist at 13 by winning which medal?
Bronze in park
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.
Q 26Which American street skater, a multiple world champion, finally won his first Olympic medal at Paris 2024?
Nyjah Huston
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.
Q 27What is the rough, sandpaper-like sheet stuck to the top of a skateboard deck called?
Grip tape
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.
Q 28Which surf-pop duo turned the Beach Boys' "Catch a Wave" into a 1964 hit about skateboarding?
Jan and Dean
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.
Q 29Which Canadian singer had a 2002 hit with "Sk8er Boi", about a girl who snubs a skateboarder?
Avril Lavigne
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.
Q 30Which ice-dance pair earned twelve perfect 6.0s for a routine set to Ravel's "Boléro" at the 1984 Winter Olympics?
Torvill and Dean
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.