At half-past 10 on Wednesday morning, Sky Brown, 13 years and 28 days old, tipped forward on her board and dropped into the scalded concrete bowl of the Olympic skate park.
As she did it, the stadium DJ started to play the Stone Roses’ She Bangs the Drums, released 19 years before she was even born, so as she carved down, across and up that first curve the driving bass line thumped around the empty grandstands. “Kiss me where the sun don’t shine, the past was yours but the future’s mine,” sang Ian Brown as she shot off the lip, far and high across the sky, then landed, and raced away down and on to the next slope.
Maybe you already know Sky Brown, have read or seen one of her interviews, maybe you saw her on Dancing With the Stars: Juniors, or you, or more likely your kid, are one of her million Instagram followers, or the millions more who have seen her viral videos. Maybe you already know what the rest of us are only just discovering, which is what a glorious thing it is to see her skate, a mind-boggling, eye-popping, head-spinning trip, a 45-second whirlwind of handplants, nose grinds, aerials, leaps, twists, spins, and flips. It’s acrobatics at a hundred miles an hour. Brown is so wildly talented that it was immediately apparent, even to these blind eyes, that she would win a medal.
In the end, she won the bronze. Which makes her the youngest medallist in British history. She would have been the youngest from any country since the 1930s, but the athlete who finished one place ahead of her, Japan’s Kokona Hiraki, is six weeks younger again. The winner, Hiraki’s teammate Sakura Yosozumi, was all of 19, which pretty much makes her a veteran in the skateboarding game.
Brown put on such a good show in the final that it could almost have been scripted for TV. Or YouTube. She was in fourth going into the last of her three rounds, because she had fallen twice attempting the very same trick, a kickflip indy, on the first two. Third time around, she landed it, and moved up into third place.
There was one skater left to go, the 15-year-old Misugu Okamoto, who was trying to finish a clean sweep for the Japanese. But midway through her run, she crashed, collapsed on the floor of the bowl, and burst into floods of tears. Good as Okamoto, Brown, and Hiraki are, it’s hard not to feel a little uneasy watching children this age compete on such a big stage.
In some other sports, they wouldn’t be allowed to. Gymnastics has age restrictions: you need to be over 16 to be in the Olympics. It’s not because there aren’t 15-year-olds out there who could do everything the older athletes do, it’s to protect their bodies and their mental health.Advertisement
Stu Brown, Sky’s father, touched on this when he explained why they had decided that she should compete for Great Britain, where he grew up, rather than Japan, which is where her mother, Mieko, is from. “We chose Great Britain because we felt that there was no pressure and they didn’t ask us to commit,” he said. “They made it very clear that if she wasn’t happy or wasn’t feeling good at any time we could pull out.”
