Forget Jan. 6. The worst day in recent American history came on May 2020, when the city of Los Angeles filled the skateboarding park at Venice Beach with sand. The move was a deterrent done in the name of preventing the spread of COVID. A month later, and without permission, the skaters dug out the park and started riding again.
For those of us who are skateboarders, the closing of the park was a dark day. We seem to intuitively know what has since been proven: joyful exercise in fresh air and sunlight is a natural preventative to illness, including COVID. We knew better than the buzzkill bureaucrats.
Now, science has caught up with the skaters. A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that “a regular exercise routine may significantly lower the chances of being hospitalized or even dying from COVID-19.”
Skateboarding is the perfect form of blocking COVID. Shredding down a hill with the sun on your face and the wind in your hair is the antithesis of masking up. It’s no wonder the sport has thrived during the pandemic. By the end of 2020, skateboard sales had jumped 75% compared with 2019, according to ActionWatch, which records the numbers.
There was a time in 2020 when the sales boom collided with supply chain shortages and missing workers. Some shops were out of boards, trucks, wheels, or bearings, which are the “hard goods” of skateboarding. One plant, BBS, was forced to shut down temporarily due to the pandemic. Now, BBS is producing 10,000 boards a day, double what they had been producing four years ago.
Then there is Girlswirl, a female skating group that began in 2018 when nine girls on a text chain in California decided to get together and encourage themselves and others to take up skateboarding. The group is now a thousand members strong and has held more than 100 public group skates.
Seeing the pictures and video of the Girlswirlers, who describe themselves as “the world’s okayest skaters,” it almost seems like a bygone America. Smiles. Laughter. Fun. Joy. Being outdoors.
Last January, University of Exeter scholar Dr. Paul O’Connor released a study showing that skateboarding provides a significant psychological boost. “Skateboarding provides a serious emotional outlet for people who have experienced personal trials in the collapse of long-term relationships, career challenges, parenthood, and substance abuse,” O’Connor reported. He told the Independent: “For those I spoke to, skateboarding was more than about looking after physical health. On at least two occasions when I asked informants to try to explain what skateboarding meant to them, I was confronted with grown men fighting back tears, literally lost for words in grasping to communicate the importance and gravitas of their pastime.”
Like jazz, movies, and comic books, skateboarding is one of America’s great original art forms. A $5 billion industry with 16 million members in the U.S., skateboarding fosters community, physical grace, and freedom.
It has also, despite its reputation for attracting laid-back surfers and countercultural urban thrill seekers, been a wellspring of entrepreneurship. In 1971, a young Virginia Tech student named Frank Nasworthy turned $700 he earned working in a restaurant into the Cadillac Wheels Company, which soon produced a new model of a polyurethane wheel. He was soon selling 300,000 sets a year.
More recently, in 1996, Carver Skateboards in Venice patented a new truck design for their boards. The video history of the trial-and-error period should be shown at the Wharton School of Business. A cross between Edison and the guys from Jackass, Carver and his colleague crash, roll, and tumble into the sidewalk as they perfect their invention.
America in the last few years has been like a downhill skater who takes a bad spill. It’s been painful and depressing. The thing about us skaters, though, is that, like America, we always get back up.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
