Burn the Scoreboards

Michael Christie on Skateboarding and Olympic Sport

I have something to confess: I detest the fact that skateboarding is now an official Olympic event. And though I know a few of the skaters who represented their nations in Tokyo in 2021, and I’ve spent decades of my life standing on a board that rolls on four little wheels, I can guarantee that I’m not going to watch a single second of it.

Let me tell you why. I grew up in Thunder Bay, a place that has reportedly spawned more NHL players per capita than anywhere in Canada. It was a pretty working-class town, and most boys my age harboured NHL dreams, including me. I had a friend on my hockey team whose father had once tried out for the Toronto Maple Leafs. During our games, he would bark angry instructions from the stands whenever my friend was on the ice. And I remember my friend once confessing that if he didn’t get a point in our game, he wouldn’t get dinner that evening. As a result, he’d often go to bed hungry, and at school I’d often split my bagged lunch with him.

Though I loved the physical sensation of gliding across the ice, I distinctly remember skating around during those hockey games and glancing up at the scoreboard and just hating the sight of it. It had nothing to do with whether my team was winning or losing, I instead hated the fact that one number was higher than the other, and that everyone (most particularly the adults and coaches) cared so much about the difference between them. I loathed the scoreboard’s very existence, the way it watched over us and determined who would be angry and who would be happy, and, in some tragic cases, who would be eating dinner that night.

And so, when I was around eleven years old, I quit. The hockey players in my class were horrified. A teacher took me aside and told me that I was ruining my life and I would have no friends and no girl would ever be interested in me. But that summer I was lucky enough to discover something that no adult could possibly understand: an activity with no rules, no rankings, no competition, no rep teams, no national organizations, no 6:00 a.m. practices, no body-checking, and definitely no scoreboard.

Skateboarding was all I thought about for the next twenty years, and I moved away from Thunder Bay at age eighteen so I could skate year-round in California and BC. I went on to garner a few sponsors, and eventually skateboarding led me to writing and film and photography. I wouldn’t be the writer or the person I am today without it. (It chills me to consider how things could have gone differently, and it could be me up in those stands today, yelling at my poor child as they struggled to whack a little disc of black rubber into a net.)

There remains much debate in skateboarding circles about whether skateboarding is a sport or not. And though the argument is mostly boring and semantic, I contest that skateboarding is instead a kind of improvisational dance, one that takes place not on a stage but out in the street. Its tricks are a kinetic language that skaters use to express themselves upon the architectural spaces of the world. Because you definitely don’t do a difficult skateboard trick to score points and win a competition. You do it for the pleasure it brings you. You do it simply to do it.

Which brings us back to the Olympics, and the fact that skateboarding will now be getting its very own scoreboard, albeit one determined by the absurdly subjective whims of judges. This “event” will take place in an arena, upon contrived, purpose-built obstacles, with corporate sponsors adorning every surface. The competition will be fierce. The skateboarding that was a salvation for me and countless others will be nowhere in sight.

So please, instead of watching Olympic skateboarding, Google some great, innovative skateboarders like Leo Baker, Mark Gonzales, Cher Strauberry, Tyshawn Jones, Breana Geering, or Rick McCrank. Watch how freely their bodies vault and turn and whirl through space. Watch how they make a playground of their bleak urban environments. Watch their resilience and their focus and their determination to cut their own path, the exuberant, rolling joy they take in being alive.

And let’s just leave the scoreboards out of it.