Olympic Effort

Skateboarding is in the Olympics! That’s good right?

Honestly, I don’t know. It’s great for skateparks, great for making us look awesome. It’s probably bad for the heart of skateboarding, and it’ll fill skateparks with skate jocks.

People are saying “Skateboarders won’t pass drug tests”. Don’t be so fucking dramatic. There are skateboarders who don’t do drugs. Skateboarding and weed are not one and the same. You don’t have to skate to enjoy weed, and you don’t have to smoke weed to skate. We’ll have guys reppin’ the UK who are not stoners.

We’re most likely going to get a really characterless, robotic bunch of guys all wearing the same clothes, doing perfect tre flips down stairs, landing bolts. That’s just the way people think you win competitions: You need to be perfect, and you can’t land sketchy. We all know that if a hard trick is landed sketchy, it don’t matter, coz the trick is what is important. The Olympics is all about presentation though, and they will expect clean tricks – so I think we’ll just see standard tricks done very cleanly with almost no effort. And that, my friends, is fucking boring.

The best outcome I, as a man in his thirties who skates, can expect, is that this makes skateboarding more accepted so I don’t get idiots giving me shit for

A) Skateboarding, and

B) Being a 30-odd year old who skates

Which, if it happened, would be nice. Let’s be honest, though, if I gave a shit about Johnny Public’s opinion of me riding a plank with wheels, I wouldn’t be riding a plank with wheels.

But, why should I care, I don’t even watch the Olympics.