Random Skateboarding Athletes Generator

So you drew a skateboarder

You wanted a skateboarder and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It mixes the street skaters, who use handrails and ledges and stairs, with the park and vert riders, who ride bowls and ramps, and it spans the founding figures and the current competitive circuit.

The tool is the simple part. Skateboarding is the hardest thing on this site to write about as a sport, because for most of its history it insisted it was not one, and the argument is still live.

A sport with no rulebook

Skateboarding was invented, roughly, by Californian surfers in the 1950s who wanted something to do when the sea was flat. It spent decades with no governing body, no world championship, no agreed rules and no referees. It was a thing people did in empty swimming pools during a drought and in the concrete architecture of cities that had been designed with no thought of them.

What it had instead of a rulebook was a culture, and the culture had one measure of value: did you land it, and did it look good. Skateboarding's history was recorded not in results tables but in photographs and video parts, and a skater's reputation rested on a five-minute film of them landing things in the street rather than on any contest. That is a genuinely unusual way for a discipline to organise itself, and it is why the names on this list divide into two groups that barely overlap: the contest skaters, whose careers are on this list because they won things, and the legends of the street, whose careers exist on film.

The tricks are named after the people who landed them

Here is the detail that reveals everything about how skateboarding thinks. In gymnastics, a new element is submitted to a federation and awarded a difficulty value. In skateboarding, if you invent a trick, it gets your name, and the name sticks by common consent with no committee involved anywhere.

The most important trick in the sport is the ollie, the act of leaping into the air with the board apparently stuck to your feet, which underpins essentially everything else. It is named after Alan Gelfand, whose nickname was Ollie. The kickflip, the heelflip, the McTwist, the Madonna, the Caballerial, named after Steve Caballero: the vocabulary of the sport is a list of people who did something first and were acknowledged for it by everybody else. No sanctioning body ratified any of it. When the tool draws you a name, there is a decent chance that person's surname is currently being shouted in a skatepark somewhere by a teenager who has no idea it was a person.

The 900

In 1999, at the X Games, Tony Hawk attempted two and a half rotations in the air off a vert ramp, a trick that had been theorised and never landed. He failed. He failed again. He kept failing, past the end of the competition, which the organisers simply allowed to run over because everybody in the building understood what was happening. On the eleventh attempt he landed it.

The 900 is the single most famous moment in skateboarding, and it is worth understanding why it matters more than any medal. It was not won. There was no opponent. It was a person trying to do something that had never been done, in front of people who wanted him to do it, and the contest had already finished. That is skateboarding's actual value system rendered in one clip. Hawk went on to become the most famous skateboarder alive, largely through a video game that introduced the sport to a generation who had never stood on a board, and half the skaters on this list are in some sense his descendants.

The Olympics, and a podium full of children

Skateboarding joined the Olympics at the Tokyo Games, and the culture braced for the worst. What actually happened was strange and rather beautiful. The women's street podium consisted of two thirteen-year-olds and a sixteen-year-old. In the park event the silver medallist was twelve. Britain's Sky Brown took bronze at thirteen. And when a competitor fell attempting a difficult trick on her last run, the rest of the field, her rivals, ran over and lifted her onto their shoulders.

That is not how Olympic sport usually behaves, and it went around the world. The Games have not really tamed skateboarding, and skateboarding has not really been corrupted by the Games, which is more than the pessimists expected. The two competitive disciplines you will see are street, which uses rails, stairs and ledges, and park, which is a flowing bowl of curves and transitions. Most skaters on this list specialise in one and would look ordinary in the other.

What a random skateboarder is good for

• Discovering the sport properly. Draw a name and go and find their video part rather than their contest results. That is where skateboarding actually lives.
• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask people who the ollie is named after. Almost nobody knows.
• Olympic sweepstakes. Draw skaters for a group during the street and park finals.
• Settling a debate. Pull two skaters and argue it, contest results against influence, which is the sport's oldest argument.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a skater and research how a culture with no rules produced a global sport.

Skateboarding questions

What is the 900?

Two and a half mid-air rotations on a vert ramp. Tony Hawk landed the first one at the X Games in 1999, on his eleventh attempt, after the competition had already ended. It is the most famous moment in the sport's history.

Why are tricks named after people?

Because skateboarding had no governing body for most of its life. Whoever landed a trick first was credited by common consent, so the ollie is named after Alan Gelfand and the Caballerial after Steve Caballero. Nobody ratified any of it.

What is the difference between street and park?

Street uses the furniture of a city, rails, ledges and stairs. Park is a flowing bowl of curves and transitions ridden at speed. They are the two Olympic disciplines, and most skaters specialise in one.

Can I pull several skaters, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. World Skate. worldskate.org
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, skateboarding. britannica.com