If you grew up playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 or watching MTV, you might be a fan of skateboarding while also not thinking it is “Olympic Material.” Maybe you’ve seen Lords of Dogtown and don’t think that the violent image of a drunk Heath Ledger throwing boards off of a roof is a good look for an international sporting event and maybe that is the reason it has never made an appearance. You might be right, until now.
On the second full day of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, skateboarding made its big debut as an official Olympic Game. There are two different events, split between men’s and women’s. The events are “park” and “street.”
Park Skateboarding includes the traditional half-pipe vert ramp where contestants perform tricks in midair. They have three attempts to perform a trick that judges rate on a 1-100 scale, only the best score counts. The other two scores are thrown out.
Street Skateboarding is more similar to playing “free roam” on the classic Tony Hawk playstation games. Contestants are presented with a course of ramps, rails, benches, and stairs where they have two :45 second runs to land as many tricks as they can. Then, each skater gets 5 attempts to pull off unique tricks for a final score. Out of these seven runs, the top 4 are selected for judging.
American Jagger Eaton went home with the first bronze medal ever given to skateboarding athletes at the olympics. Eaton is from Arizona and competed in the men’s street event. There are still three other skateboarding events that haven’t started yet, men’s park, women’s street, and women’s park.
