Crashing Tokyo
I’m ambivalent about skateboarding in the Olympics, but not about the slams.
BY JUSTIN HOCKING
Whether or not you witnessed skateboarding’s debut in the 2020 Olympic Games, you may have seen it: the cringe-inducing footage of Peruvian skateboarder Angelo Caro Narvaez sliding backwards off his board at full speed and scissoring onto a metal post, his groin taking the entire brunt of the fall.
All too common in professional skateboarding, bails like this play by the thousands on Instagram and in skate video credit-reels. The difference this time, of course: Narvaez’s slam-seen-round-the-world went down in Tokyo’s Ariake Sports Park, for a televised audience numbering in the 15.3 million range.
It was one of dozens of serious falls I watched live on NBC and the USA network. A reluctant viewer, I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the Street event; with its emphasis on single tricks and technical wizardry, it can present as a bit stale, despite the impossible difficulty of the skating involved. In fact, the entire prospect of skateboarding in the Olympic Games feels deeply suspect to me. It’s troubling to witness a pursuit that has been a central part of your life for the better part of thirty years be claimed by the Olympic juggernaut that so often stripmines joy and spontaneity from sports, with questionable effects on host cities and the bodies (and souls) of competitors.
Those gut-twisting slams, though. They captured my attention; they registered in my bones. South African Brandon Valjalo broke his wrist during practice but still competed in the final heats with his arm in a cast. His fifteen-year-old teammate Boipelo Awuah fractured her pelvis. Regardless of my skepticism about the whole endeavor, these young men and women were going after it, sacrificing their physical selves and taking full-body hammerings that could end other Olympians’ entire careers.
And they were doing it on concrete.
Having sustained a minor concussion during a fall earlier this summer, I’m freshly aware of cement’s unforgiving hardness. The same surface that makes for a smooth, zippy ride can fracture your skull in an instant, and still fresh from my own injury, I had to look away, repeatedly, from the tv screen. This is when I made the mistake of glancing at the incoming tide of Twitter comments: “I don’t remember seeing this many falls in the X-games,” “Why so many falls?” and “Doesn’t look good for skateboarding to be included again in 2024.”
I anticipated feeling a lot of things watching Olympics skateboarding—mainly bemusement and cynicism about the uniforms and the prospect of stern-faced skate coaches (though I didn’t actually spot any), and of course some excitement to see skaters I admire, like Lizzie Armanto, Cory Juneau, and Japanese prodigy Yuto Horigome.
What I didn’t expect to feel was defensive.
Failure is arguably skateboarding’s most ineluctable quality. We repeatedly fall on our palms, elbows, knees, hips, tailbones, and even our faces. Then we get back up and try again. Beyond the literal act, this practice has become central to my sense of self; it sustains me through the vicissitudes of living with serious health challenges. It’s a core tenet in my own writing process, too, and in my mentorship of younger writers—it takes endless messy drafts to nail anything. Even Jerry Seinfeld gets it. In a Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episode with Chris Rock, he says, “To learn a skateboard trick, how many times do you have to get something wrong before you get it right? And you hurt yourself...You learn to do that trick, now you’ve got a life lesson. Whenever I see those skateboard kids, I think those kids will be alright.”
Witness the collision of skateboarding and the Olympic drive toward perfection, and the toll it takes on individuals, in favored-to-win skateboarder Nyjah Huston’s post mortem Instagram feed: “I feel like I let a lot of people down,” he writes, regarding his missed chance at a medal. He goes on to describe how hard he can be on himself, how he has self-medicated with booze after previous contest losses. “Mental health is so important!” he writes, “Because when it comes down to it, I don’t skate to be the best, or to be famous, or make money, or to be an Olympian.”
Simone Biles’s now famous decision to remove herself from the Olympic gymnastics rotation translates Huston’s sentiments into bold action. And in the end, Biles really doesn’t need the Olympics. She has her own thing going, like an upcoming nationwide tour of women gymnasts that focuses more on dancing and actual fun (gasp) than death-defying score-grabs—just like skateboarding has its own thing going every day in the streets and skateparks of just about every country on Earth.
To quote cultural critic Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism plunders the body’s sensuality.” If we can label the Olympics the ultimate spectacle of competitive capitalist ideology, then Biles’s decision, and Huston’s words, are a way of reclaiming their own bodies from the scrum.
Not that fun or grace were completely absent from the Olympic Street event. Thirteen-year-old Women’s gold medalist Momiji Nishiya looked joyful at times, especially on the podium. Men’s winner Yuto Horigome skated with a casual, loose-shouldered style while throwing down tricks no one else in the world can land.
Does winning the gold make Horigome the best skateboarder in the world? The question itself raises a deeper issue: why the need to graft superlatives and elite status onto practitioners of an art form? It follows the same reasoning, by conservative economist Friedrich Hayek’s logic, that we view society as one giant marketplace, where individuals’ sole purpose is to compete for success. It’s an ideology that’s led to decades of neoliberal gutting of humanist values: community, collaboration, support, and care for our fellow humans. To me, these are what skateboarding’s all about. And about failure—our ability to get back up after falling, like Angelo Narvaez did, dust yourself off, and keep rolling.
Maybe it’s time to roll right out of the Olympic pavilion, Simone Biles-style? To quote legendary skater Tony Alva, speaking of the adoption of skateboarding by the Olympics: “They need us more than we need them.” I can feel a sea change stirring around this year’s Olympics, as younger generations jump ship from the unquestioned worship of winner-take-all competition. At the very least, we can roll away from the Olympic mindset—the idea that glory resides only in victory, and that we should feel shame about falling down.
Justin Hocking is the author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Memoir, winner of the Oregon Book Award and a finalist of the PEN Center USA award for Nonfiction. He teaches nonfiction in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Portland State University.
