Are Skateboarders Really Athletes?

By Author: Josh Brennon
Total Articles: 38
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There is nothing that is more extreme then the sport of skateboarding. Skateboarding started out by simply nailing rolling skate wheels to a plank of wood and has since evolved into a worldwide phenomenon and recognized extreme sport. Skateboarding has gone through a lot to get to the point it is at now but that discussion is for a different article. Here I want to talk about why skateboarding is so extreme and so popular. Skateboarding takes a kind of athlete that very few sports require. Balance, strength, intuition, guts, skill and a natural ability are just a small sample of what a person needs to become a great skateboarder. The skateboarders of today are quite possibly the most talented athletes in the world. When you compare the difficulty, danger, skill level, variety and competition of the sport it is really not hard to see why. There are also a number of avenues that the sport of skateboarding has been down that solidified it as an extreme sport, avenues like the X Games and the Gravity Games.
When you think of an athlete you generally think of a football, baseball or basketball player. Perhaps you ...
... think of a track and field athlete, swimmer or tap dancer (kidding). Before the recent skateboard revolution in the 90's and today not many people would have lumped skateboarders into the category of athlete; thug, trouble maker, talented or maybe skilled, but not athlete. But now when you compare the types of tricks skateboarders are doing, and the unbelievable things they get their bodies to do when they are 15 feet in the air and then land smooth just to hit another huge air seconds later to the things typical athletes do, people are actually starting to say that skateboarders are arguably MORE athletic then a what we know as a typical athlete. After watching competitions like the X Games I am not one to argue that point. What professional skateboarders are able to do with a chunk of wood on wheels is uncanny.
Simply the danger and difficulty of skateboarding are enough to steer thousands of hopeful professional skaters away from the scene, but those that press through know what it took to get there. There are not too many other sports that draw comparisons of difficulty to skateboarding. Take this for example you take off going extremely fast launch into the air, while your in the air you flip your body, rotate the board under your feet, catch the board with your hand, put the board back under your feet, land on the board and keep riding oh and do it all with style. It is pretty amazing what skateboarders are able to do these days and very fun to watch. Luckily the main stream has caught on to this incredible sport and competitions like x games and gravity games now highlight skateboarding as one of their main events. This gets the word out and shows the world that these guys are in the most extreme sport and deserve to be called world class athletes.