Sky Brown: Hopes that skateboarder’s Olympic bronze will be ‘a catalyst’ for the sport

Just 28 days after her 13th birthday, Brown became Great Britain’s youngest medallist of all time when she won bronze in the women’s park skateboarding final in the Tokyo Olympics on Wednesday morning.

After falling in her first two runs of the final, the 13-year-old nailed her last attempt with a score of 56.47 to finish behind Japanese pair Sakura Yosozumi and Kokona Hiraki.

Lucy Adams, a professional skater who is Skateboard GB’s progression project lead, told the PA news agency: “I’m absolutely stoked for her and her phenomenal performance today. She absolutely smashed it. I couldn’t be more proud of her.

“This is a catalyst for another boom in the sport.”

Ms Adams, who was behind the move to bring Brown on to Team GB, said she spotted her talent early on.

She said: “I saw her when she eight, nine years old. She actually came over here and competed in a competition we had over here and literally just blew me away with one of the technical tricks she did on a ramp that was like twice the size of her, and we just formed a relationship back then and we kept in touch.

“This was way before skateboarding was announced for the Olympics and when we got that announcement, we just had a conversation between Stu (Sky’s dad) and Sky about the potential to give it a go.

“Knowing that she was so young and not wanting to put any pressure on any sort of specific expectations, and just say if you want to take part, go for it and have fun. If you don’t feel comfortable, there are no expectations from us.”

James Hope-Gill, chief executive of Skateboard GB, who is responsible for creating the strategy for supporting UK skateboarding for the next 12 years, said he hoped the result would raise skateboarding’s profile and lead to more funding and also boost its “credibility”.

He said: “Hopefully investment will increase. We’ve had some really generous investment from the lottery and UK Sport. There’s about 1,700 skate parks in the UK, and the lottery have been brilliant in funding some of those.

“What we need now is an indoor international facility… to really help our talented skaters to reach their potential.

“A lot of people think skateboarding is just kids messing around on the street, causing a bit of a nuisance. Skateboarding is so much more than that.

“The great thing about skateboarding is that it’s so accessible. You literally need a board and you can skate on the street, anywhere there’s a bit of concrete.

Skaters Lola Tambling and Miriam Nelson, both 13, said watching Brown and her fellow Team GB skater Bombette Martin compete has inspired them aim to take part in the Games.

Lola, who has skated since the age of eight and whose parents own an indoor skate park, said: “(Sky’s medal) was great, it’s amazing. It was very intense watching it, but when she managed to pull off the third round, it was a relief and we were all stoked for her.”

Miriam, who has been skating for four years, said: “It was amazing because she and Bombette have been working so hard for it and the hard work paid off.”

Sky has almost one million Instagram followers and could boast both a victory on the American television series ‘Dancing With The Stars: Juniors’ and a World Championship medal on her list of achievements before she had even reached her teens.

On Wednesday at a steaming Ariake Urban Park, Sky Brown added arguably her most audacious achievement yet as she held her nerve to nail her final run of the women’s skateboard park competition to become Great Britain’s youngest medallist of all time.

At 13 years and 28 days, Brown – who astonishingly was not even the youngest athlete on the medal podium, with that honour going to Japan’s 12-year-old silver medallist Kokona Hiraki – has accomplished far more than the majority of her contemporaries will manage in a lifetime.

Yet it was not the mere fact of her bronze medal that impressed the most – it was Brown’s ability to shrug off successive falls in the first two of her three final runs and nail the last, with a trick that had repeatedly eluded her, as if she was enjoying just another day down at the skate park.

Her British-born father, Stu, has been adamant that Sky should enter the Olympics on her own terms. He dissuaded her from an initial, outrageous ambition to also try to compete in surfing, although she is adamant that that will be her goal at the Paris Olympics in just three years’ time.

Brown was born in Miyazaki, Japan, in July 2008, just one month prior to the Beijing Olympics, at which the idea of a sport like skateboarding elbowing its way on the sacred schedule would have been regarded as something approaching preposterous.

Brown’s father was a skateboarder and she emulated him early, learning her tricks via Youtube which she would then try to match on a makeshift ramp in the family’s back garden. She proved so successful that at the age of 10 she became the youngest professional skateboarder in the world.

Growing up between Japan and California, Brown won ‘Dancing With The Stars’ in 2018, and the following year she committed to trying to fulfil her Olympic ambitions representing Great Britain, having previously indicated she might represent the country of her birth.

Brown finished third at the park World Championships in Sao Paolo in 2019, a performance that effectively secured her place at the Olympics, although her future in the sport was thrown into doubt by an horrific crash in training in May last year.

She suffered a fractured skull and various other injuries during a dramatic fall from a half-pipe, which she captured and posted on social media. From her hospital bed, she wrote: “I’m excited to come back even stronger and tougher. My heart wants to go so hard right now.”

Despite initial doubts over whether she would even continue in the sport, Brown proved as good as her word. She warmed up for her Olympic debut by winning gold at the prestigious X Games last month. But the most high-profile moment of her young life was yet to come.

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