2024-08-08 06:28:45
[PARiS 2024]
Gold-dipped Australian True “Just have fun and that’s it”… No tears from victory, just cheers and feet-thudding
41 of 88 competitors are teenagers… 11-year-old girl also enjoys the stadium
Australian representative Arisa True (14) finished first in the women’s park skateboarding finals at the Paris Olympics on the 6th. In doing so, she became the youngest gold medalist at these Olympics. True, who was jumping for joy when she won the gold medal, smiled and said, “I’m so excited. I thought that I just had to have fun skating with my friends and do my best, and that led to a good result.” Not only True, but also Kokona Hiraki (16, Japan), who won the silver medal in this event, and Sky Brown (16, UK), who won the bronze medal, are also teenagers.
Up until this day, there have been a total of 203 awards ceremonies at the Paris Olympics, and this was the second time that only teenagers stood on the podium. The first record was also set in the women’s street skateboarding event. In this event, Koko Yoshizawa (15, Japan) won gold, Rizu Akama (15, Japan) won silver, and Haisa Leao (16, Brazil) won bronze.
The youngest average age of medalists in this Olympics is also in skateboarding, which has four gold medals. Up until this day, the average age of the nine skateboarders who have won medals in this competition is only 18.9 years old. This is more than four years older than the second-place marathon swimmer (23.2 years old). Of the 88 skateboarders, 41 are teenagers. Zheng Haohao, the Chinese female representative born on August 11, 2012, also set the record for the youngest Olympic participant since Dimitrios Lundras (10 years old, Greece, gymnastics) in the 1896 Athens Olympics.
Japan’s strength is also a characteristic of this sport. Skateboarding became an official Olympic sport from the Tokyo Games held just before. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) gave the host country the right to add official sports starting from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. Japan added skateboarding to the official sports along with karate, baseball/softball, etc. It shows how confident they were in this sport. Japan has won 5 out of 7 skateboarding Olympic gold medals from Tokyo and Paris up to this day.
If you expand the scope to ‘Japanese descent’, it’s even more. True, the youngest gold medalist at this competition, and Brown, who won bronze in this event for the second consecutive time after the 2021 Tokyo Games, were both born to a British father and a Japanese mother. Brown was born and raised in Miyazaki, Japan.
Skateboarding, which first appeared in California, USA in the 1950s, began to gain popularity among Japanese youth in the 1970s. The older generation in Japan also looked down on this ‘wooden board with wheels’. The New York Times reported that “skateboarding was considered a ‘symbol of resistance culture’ in the United States, but in Japan it was viewed as a ‘prank of troublemakers’ that obstructed pedestrian traffic, was noisy, and dirty.” Of course, the atmosphere is different now. According to the Mainichi Shimbun, the number of skateboarding-only stadiums in Japan increased from 243 in 2021 to 475 this year.
Olympic skateboarding is divided into two categories: street and park. Street, as the name suggests, is played on streets with obstacles such as stairs and railings. Park, which originated from skateboarding in drained swimming pools, is played on a sunken area like a park skateboarding rink. Street and park have been included as official events in the Asian Games since the 2018 Jatarta-Palembang Games.
Reporter Kim Seong-mo [email protected]
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2024-08-08 06:28:45