Skateboarding History

History of Skateboarding

It was in the middle of the last century, specifically in the fifties of the 20th century that we already left behind when one of the most fashionable sports today appeared for the first time: skateboarding.

This sport based on the need to transfer a sport like surfing to the surface of the earth has its origins in Californian lands, and more specifically it has in the surfers of the area that at that time dedicated themselves to creating their own boards of land surfing, or rather, as can be said in its name in English, its “land surfboards”. It should be noted that skate wheels were added to these boards and it was at that moment that skateboarding was born.

Without a doubt, the appearance of this sport was quite a revulsion and it was one of the first sports that could receive the qualification of "extremes", and a good honor that it did to that fame, since it can be said that in the early days , throughout the first years of practicing this sport, many people were injured while practicing it, and it is certainly both the equipment that was used (lacking above all the necessary mobility), as well as the technical training of many of the determined athletes, it was far from offering a safe and guaranteed practice.

The development of skateboarding was unstoppable (with the emergence of included variables, as well as different techniques that were being developed with the consolidation of this sport in society) and there was a time when this sport was exceptionally famous, especially all in the USA, when one of the biggest dreams of any child was to build their own boards to try to emulate their elders who saw them practice this interesting discipline.

As has already been said, the early days of skateboarding were not easy for him, because although this sport developed greatly, its materials and technique still had a long way to go to develop sufficiently to become the great sport that has become in recent decades. For such development it can be said that the technical evolution of the people who practice it has been key, but without any doubt if this had not been accompanied by a spectacular advance in the materials it would not have been possible.

And it is that the progress has been spectacular in terms of material, since those rudimentary boards without risers that saw the birth of this fantastic sport are long gone, since they lived an evolution towards rectangular tables that would incorporate risers so that the ollie was something much easier to execute. At the same time, the sides became smaller, becoming rounded and later the boards opted to incorporate the sandpaper, or also called griptape.

Obviously, all these advances were accompanied by an improvement in the materials themselves, since the boards have gone from being heavy slabs, to wooden boards that are endowed with great resistance as well as durability, and the wheels have left the model behind. of initial metallic roller blades to delve into the discovery of urethane, a breakthrough that has led, among other things, to a much lighter fit of the boards.