London

Will 2012 be rad, awesome, gnarly and ripping? Or will it be sketchy, bogus and generally suck? When I first heard that, as host city for the Olympics, London might showcase skateboarding as a new sporting discipline, I nearly bailed (fell off my board). Actually, that’s a lie – I have largely avoided skateboards for ten years, since discovering that my body couldn’t take the jarring moves any more and that my bones were breaking instead of bouncing back.

Metaphorically at least, I fell off my board because skating has never been a real sport – at least not by the athletic, competitive standards that most Olympic events model themselves on. Developed by Californian surfers in the 1960s, skateboarding became a kooky craze that took the UK by storm in the 1970s. Even Time Out jumped on the four-wheeled fad in 1977, dedicating an issue to the phenomenon of ‘sidewalk surfing’. Unlike the hula hoop or the Spacehopper, however, skating would endure and evolve into a serious pastime with its own culture, style and language.
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Ossian takes off under the South Bank

As a British scene emerged, a rash of legendary concrete skate parks were built in and around London, including Rolling Thunder in Brentford and Skate City near Tower Bridge. In those days there were half-hearted attempts to run skating as a traditional sport with an official association staging competitions, but these amateur events operated like school sports days and were squarely aimed at younger riders.

It wasn’t long before growing safety fears and a sharp U-turn in public interest shut the big municipal parks and made skateboarding unfashionable, antisocial and obnoxious almost over night. In the early 1980s it went underground and, like me, found a spiritual home in the shadowy undercroft of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. The architects had inadvertently designed the perfect skate terrain of banks, steps, ledges and smooth paving slabs, but with no entrance fee, rules or regulations. The South Bank became a melting pot of boarders from all corners and walks of London life, or as one regular put it at the time: ‘It’s like “Cheers”, where everyone knows your name.’

The happy days were soon over after the GLC was abolished in 1986 and the new South Bank management put up barriers, turned the lights out and threw gravel on the ground. Next, the City of London outlawed skateboarding altogether. For a while the wheels stopped turning.

These difficult years in between skating’s seesawing periods of popularity – of which another positive wave is surely due any day – have only helped to cement its hardcore following in this country. What began as a hobby for me soon became a lifestyle. It was never the sportiest option, because ‘training’ didn’t involve lengths, laps or time trials but blood, sweat and tears, often all at the same time.

The majority of practitioners in London are street skaters, like those still found on the South Bank today, and tend to be free-spirited and fiercely individualistic – if not a little cocky and offensive, too. They certainly don’t like being told what to do or how to skate, so the idea of trying to round up these wayward slackers to take part in an old-fashioned Olympiad seems ridiculous. No self-respecting South Bank local would ever be seen dead in Spandex with bright red GB livery on his chest. Nor could the Olympic motto of ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’ (Swifter, Higher, Stronger) ever replace the more usual ‘Skate or Die’ and ‘Skate and Destroy’.

The feedback from the skate community so far is unremittingly negative. The unofficial chronicler of South Bank skate history, Winstan Whitter, whose film ‘Rollin’ Through the Decades’ is also the only one to document the rises and falls of the British scene, admits ‘skaters don’t really want to know’. Online petitions to keep their pursuit out of the 2012 Games litter their posts with four-letter insults aimed at big-name skaters who might dare sell out for a shot at gold. Whitter echoes some of their concerns: ‘How will they judge it? How can you skate for your country? I am the only native Ghanaian skateboarder in the world as far as I know.’

If allowed Olympic status, skateboarding will most likely be represented by a vertical contest scored by performing tricks on halfpipes, staged at London’s new velodrome at the Olympic Park. To be eligible to take part in the 2012 Olympics under International Olympic Committee rules, skateboarding would have to be taken under the wing of a recognised sport, which in this case would be cycling, whose official body, the International Cycling Union, is already in charge of introducing BMXing to the 2008 Beijing Games. This has sent more alarm bells clanging in the skate world as now the International Skateboarding Federation will have to jump through more than just the Olympic’s five bureaucratic rings to get anything done in time.

While it was no real surprise when skateboarding was introduced as a demonstration sport at the closing ceremony of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, British skating has never been as glamorous as its American cousin and is not nearly as prepared as it should be. ‘How can we host skating at the Olympics when none of the country’s indoor parks receive funding from bodies such as Sport England?’ asks Kevin Parrott of the recently founded UK Skateboarding Association. ‘It rains for a third of the year here.’

‘Our two medal hopefuls are 15-year-olds from Norfolk who have to drive two and a half hours to Birmingham just to skate on one of only two competition-standard ramps in the country [the other is in Blackpool], and even that had to close briefly a few weeks ago and, like this pair of kids, still faces an uncertain future. We don’t want to end up with another Eddie the Eagle.’

Whether London’s skaters will benefit from the high-profile unveiling od skateboarding as a competitive sport in 2012 will depend on whether anyone in the numerous echelons of the Olympic Delivery Authority or the IOC suddenly starts caring more about the sporting stars of the future and less about improving their image, widening their target audience or grabbing lucrative sponsorships deals. ‘For London’s sake we need one big epicentre,’ says Whitter, ‘but it must be free to skate.’

Despite assurances from the Southbank Centre that ‘skateboarders are here to stay on our estate’, the currently boarded-up walls of the undercroft tell a different story and were supposedley only put there to store materials while refurbishments were carried out on the now-completed Royal Festival Hall. Whether at the South Bank or some place else, the real thrill of the ride was always in making use of urban spaces that hadn’t been designed with skating in mind. All this talk of packaging, sanitising and regulating something that is rebellious by nature just makes me want to go shred, carve, grind and slash.

‘Rollin’ Through the Decades’ is on DVD and available at www.rollinthroughthedecades.com

Where to skate in London
Bay Sixty 6
Now sponsored by Xbox, this space will be completely restructured by autumn.
Bay 66-67, Acklam Rd, W10 .

Cantelowes Skatepark
This Camden Road park recently been staged its own ‘Hackney Olympics’.
Cantelowes Gardens, Camden Rd, NW1.

Meanwhile Gardens
Four-acre space with two skateable areas.
156-158 Kensal Rd, W10.

Stockwell Skatepark
Purpose-built area soon to be resurfaced after the first bungled attempt
Stockwell Park Rd, SW9.

New, smaller facilities have also opened up in Finsbury Park, Peckham and Mudchute.