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Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Many Sunnyvale skaters like Josh Spira, pictured here last week at De Anza Park, may experience newfound respect due to the X-Games competition, which brings sports like street luge and speed rock climbing into the mainstream.
X-Games, skateboard park could help sport
Local skateboarders may capitalize on the newfound popularity of their sport
By Kelly Wilkinson
In a recent crop of television commercials, Nike poses the question "What would happen if all athletes were treated like skateboarders?"
The ads show cops busting up illegal tennis games, jogs, and golf games, calling the well-groomed participants jackasses and shining bright lights into their eyes while onlookers berate the stammering athletes.
And while Nike didn't invent the premise, they have capitalized on a long-held sentiment of skateboarders.
Steve Kobata, manager of Sessions skateboarding shop on Fremont Avenue, echoes the premise in talking about the sport.
"It would be a big awakening if people doing other sports were treated the same way as skateboarders," he says.
Kobata theorizes that the popularity of the X Games, a festival of extreme sports that has been raging on the streets of San Francisco for 10 days and came to a close last weekend, is a step in the right direction to raise appreciation of skateboarding and other alternative sports.
"It's helping to promote a positive aspect of skateboarding," he said.
This year's fifth annual X Games include traditionally marginalized sports such as skateboarding and dirt biking, along with unexpected adaptations of other popularized sports such as street luge, where competitors strap themselves horizontally to adapted luges and steer themselves along a course at up to 90 miles an hour.
And with each day's event drawing between 10,000 and 50,000 spectators and being beamed into 171 million households across the globe, former skeptics and enthusiasts alike are pointing to the popularity of the games as a watershed event for alternative sports' increasing acceptance.
"It's definitely positive," Kobata says from behind the counter of Sessions. Behind him are gleaming rows of bright skateboards hung from a pegboard and splashed with slick graphics. A greasy pepperoni pizza sits on the counter in front of him, and a skateboarding video plays above him with thumping music timed to emphasize graceful jumps and twirls off railings.
But Kobata said there is still plenty of room for more improvement, such as a city-funded skateboarding park.
"If you look around Sunnyvale, there are a ton of baseball diamonds and soccer fields, but there aren't any skateboarding parks," he said.
Instead, skateboarders hone their maneuvers on sidewalks, in backyards, along quiet leafy streets, and in certain favored parks within the city.
But according to Nancy Steward, superintendent of arts and youth services with Parks and Recreation, a skateboarding park in Sunnyvale is already on the horizon. The City Council approved a project to study its feasibility this spring, and will be looking into costs, benefits and locations in the upcoming study. Public input will be solicited from August to October. The final report is scheduled to return to councilmembers for approval next April.
"There are a lot of young people in Sunnyvale who skateboard regularly, and although there are some places to skateboard, they aren't really good places," she said.
Steward said she thinks skateboarding has proven itself as a sport with longevity, and said the X Games have proven there is a large interest that isn't waning. She also said that building a skateboarding park will give the athletes a sense of inclusion.
"They have never been given a place that is their own, and so instead they've practiced in inappropriate spots."
Steward said she thinks that may have contributed to the frequent linkage between skaters and trouble among many adults.
Joe Hutchison, a fellow Sessions worker, has been skateboarding for 12 years, and although he said he thinks the public's attitude towards his sport has improved, a negative perception still prevails.
"I think [older adults] think we're a bunch of troublemakers," he said. "And I think we get stereotyped as that all the time. But with all the commercials about skateboarding and stuff people are starting to relax a little bit, because they're just getting more used to us."
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
