Who was going to tell Tony Hawk, that boy who was given a skateboard when he was nine years old to combat his hyperactivity and who would later become a king of the asphalt, that his sport, street in origin and to some extent marginal, would figure one day on the official board of the Olympic Games: "They saw us as a family of misfits and lazy, and now the world sees us as true athletes."
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Two 13-year-old teenagers on the 'skate' podium
The 'unknown' and lonely Olympic rookie
And who was going to say to the American, who a few days ago enjoyed like a dwarf doing tricks on the ramps of Ariake Park, claimed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to promote a sport selected as bait to hook new generations , that one day a quartet of 13-year-old girls would pose boasting of a medal: “If they had told me when it started that this was going to happen, I would not have believed it. Then they made fun of us ... "
And he introduced a nuance: “The good thing about
skateboarding
is that everyone is welcomed here. It does not matter your race, your sex or how you are ”. And on the basis of the facts, neither is age. If a little more than a week ago the women's
street event
left the youngest podium in Olympic history, with two 13-year-old girls and a 16-year-old teenager, yesterday the youth again brightened the day with them, Kokona Hiraki and Sky Brown , 12 and 13 springs respectively, along with veteran Sakura Yosozumi (19). In total, 44 years in the final photo of the
park
modality
, which amounts to something like sliding down a series of ramps and mounds of cement doing pirouettes with the board.
The first one added the third Japanese gold in the discipline, and its companions were made, in order, with silver and bronze.
The United Kingdom, then, was having breakfast with sports news: Brown, whose name was already ringing strongly and who drags a million followers thanks to his viral videos on Instagram, a youth phenomenon, became the youngest medalist in history From great britain.
Bronze medal.
13 years and a very bright future ahead.
SKY BROWN.
👏🏻 # Tokyo2020 |
#skateboarding pic.twitter.com/DZKPXiar9J
- # Tokyo2020 (@ vidstokyo2020) August 4, 2021
"It's like flying, it's about getting as high as you can," proclaims the British, followed closely because her story has the spices of good media stew: it is insultingly young, then it attracts new markets; His message - "I want to inspire girls, being the smallest" - is a statement of intent; concentrates the appeal of miscegenation - British father and Japanese mother - and the United States has meticulously sponsored and projected it: it won the television program
Dancing With the Stars
(Dancing with the Stars), Nike signed a juicy sponsorship for it, it has its corresponding documentary (
Reaching the Sky
, reaching for the sky) and resides half the year there.
But there is still more.
Last year, in full preparation for the Games, he suffered a spectacular accident when performing a pirouette during training and fell from a height of six meters;
he fractured his skull and a few bones and, his parents said, he came close to losing his life.
Yesterday, however, he was excited about his medal.
At 13 years and 23 days, she is still precocious than her compatriot Margery Hinton, who swam at 13 and 44 in 1928.
Photogallery: Images of the twelfth day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games
However, the one who hung the silver was Hiraki, who is already the youngest medalist (12 years and 346 days) since 1936. Then, Frenchman Noël Vandernotte won two rowing bronzes at 12 years and 233 days. At those same Games, Marjorie Gestring won springboard gold at 13 years and 286 days. They were, logically, times without
skaters
. Without professionalization and in their proper context, the books attribute the youth record to the Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras, a boy who won bronze at the age of 10 at the 1986 Athens event.
“
Skateboarding
measures everyone by the same standard.
In it, they simply judge you by how you skate ”, emphasized the pioneer Hawk two weeks ago, while his sport takes off down the Olympic ramp, although in Spain today it only counts 450 licenses.
Even so, in the Games it has the representation of Andrea Benítez (
street
), Danny León, Jaime Mateu and Julia Benedetti (
park
).
The first, Andalusian, was the first to participate and was left out of the fight for the medals, and the last, a 16-year-old Galician, had a rugged performance and finished fourteenth.
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