skateboard Skateboarding and Commercialism

What's the problem with the Olympics? What's the problem with Nike? It's a matter of identity, and who we want to be. It's nothing to do with how good the shoe is. It's the same with the Olympics. People are against it because it goes against what they believe the identity of skateboarding is.

Expanding skateboarding is all well and good - but at what cost? Bigger isn't always better. To a lot of people respect from the general public doesn't matter, it's respect from their peers and for themselves. And it comes from what the image of skateboarding is, now. Obviously, it depends where you're from, but broadly skateboarding is associated with rebellion, individual expression and indepedence, and sometimes of a deliberate attempt to set oneself apart from the mainstream. Let's admit it, love for the thrill isn't the only reason most of us started, it's because it appealed to our sense of what's cool. It's because we identified with rebellion and nonconformism, and that is the essence of the matter. The reason to resist the brand names is to retain this spirit. Brand names are the road to the mainstream and to commercialisation, and I don't think most of us want that.

And thus, with good reason, many skaters don't want skateboarding to become just another sport. Neither do we want it commercialised. The fact is that Reebok, Nike, etc. are not getting into skateboarding because of some noble ambition to provide good shoes, or to expand the scene or win more respect for it, it's because they see money in it. There is no other reason but profit behind their moves into skateboarding. They see the growing popularity of skateboarding and they see money. The thing about "our" brands is that we don't think they're out to make a profit out of us - though whether that's true of all the skate companies is up for debate - we think of them as being our own, and we have the idea that the money we put into buying DC shoes, an Element deck, or clothing with those brands printed on them, is going to stay in the scene. It's ours, and we don't want the profit-motivated capitalist corporations to get their hands on it. We don't want our culture and our identity to be exploited so people in Beaverton, Oregon can roll around in a slightly bigger pile of money.

It's much the same deal with the Olympics. Not that there honestly is a good chance that skateboarding will get into the Olympics, if we're honest with ourselves it's more a pipe dream than something that might happen in the near future. The main reason is that the Olympics limit the number of sports which can be in it and skateboarding isn't really something under serious consideration from the sporting establishment. We aren't even a "recognised sport" yet, and that alone puts about thirty sports ahead of us in the contention, and anyway you need another existing sport to be dropped first. At best we have a chance of a chance to get into the Olympics. It just isn't likely at this point.

However, the Olympics are not actually that big a deal. Our winter cousin, snowboarding, is in the Winter Olympics and at least from what I saw at Torino this year, it seems that snowboarding brought its own culture, which is much the same as our own, given the close relationship between the two, to the Olympics rather than being subsumed by the more formal culture of the traditional sports like biathlon or ski jumping. If - and that's a big if - skateboarding gets into the Summer Games, chances are the mainstreamisation won't be as bad as the anti-Olympic skaters think. The main threat of that is coming from corporatisation.

Should we fight against it then? That's entirely up to you and it depends on what your instincts tell you. Do you honestly want skateboarding to lose what makes it unique in the first place? There's a bit of a dilemma in it for us. I'm not going to say don't get the Nike shoe or anything like that, because I don't have a right to dictate to you what to do. It's a matter of what you believe in, and that's for you to decide. It's a matter of whose intentions are more genuine - the industry we built, or the industry seeking to exploit us.

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