sporthunder.com

Skateboarders’ self-identities are tied to the number and difficulty of the moves they perform. Participants constantly try to invent even more spectacular (and dangerous) moves, working together at the skate park performing, practicing, and acting as mirrors for each other as well as relying on information in videos and magazines, the archives of skateboarding history. In the United States such magazines as Skateboarder, Thrasher, and Big Brother and in the United Kingdom Skateboard!, R.A.D., and Sidewalk Surfer are the products of skateboarders who publish what the community has to say while recording the history-in-the-making of the subculture; the great proportion of still and high-speed sequence photographs reveal the performance emphasis of the skateboarding ethos.

Skateboarders use their boards for transportation, kinetic expression, and rebellion.The board consists of a “deck,” usually made of wood and covered with highfriction grip tape; two “trucks,” for suspension and turning; and four wheels. The skateboard originated as a scooter in California in the 1930s, but by the 1950s the handlebars had been removed and the decks were shorter. Surfers took up the sport in hilly Californian coastal cities, which allowed them to recreate a sense of being on the sea.
In the 1960s skateboarding surfers took to riding the banks of empty backyard swimming pools, making tricks such as the kickturn (riding nearly vertically up a wall before lifting the front wheels and pivoting 180° to drop back down) possible. Skaters, as they became called, used all elements of the city and suburban landscape as their playground. Intentional “skate spaces” proliferated in the 1970s. Design and construction techniques were further refined and continually modified to keep up with improvements in skate techniques, which exploded in the 1980s. Renowned athletes such as Tony Hawk popularized aerial, ollie (jumping in the air while keeping the board on your feet) and flip variants of the 540° (1.5 full rotations); Danny Way began experimenting with 900° (2.5 full rotations) aerials in the 1990s.These extremely technical and dangerous moves were made possible with the help of bigger and better wooden-ramp skate parks often designed, owned, and managed by skaters themselves.