222 sk8 tricks

sk8 tricks I

sk8 shops

As skateboarding has become increasingly popular, so has the market for skater merchandise. In the early days, local surf shops with limited variety were the only place to find skateboards. Later, skateboard shops started to appear on the West Coast of the USA, and soon the trend spread to the East Coast. At present, there are many skate shops across the country, especially along coastal areas such as California.

Skate shops carry a variety of accessories such as clothes, skateboarding tools, skateboard videos, stickers, and shoes.

skateboard as a travel form

The use of skateboards solely as a form of transportation is primarily associated with the longboard. Depending on local laws, using skateboards as a form of transportation outside residential areas may or may not be legal. In this aspect, San Francisco has been described as having the most restrictive codes against skateboarding.Nevertheless, the use of skateboards as transportation in San Franciso remains rampant. Backers cite portability, exercise, and environmental friendliness as some of the benefits of skateboarding as an alternative to automobiles.

female skateboarders

Skateboarding has long been a male-dominated sport; a survey in 2002 estimated that only 26 percent of skateboarders are female.

In the early years of the sport, few female skaters gained widespread visibility; Peggy Oki, Ellen O'Neal, and Ellen Berryman were a few who achieved fame in the 1970s. The skateboarding boom in the 1990s, coupled with an overall advancement in womens' sports, produced more female skaters than in previous decades. Skaters such as Elissa Steamer and Cara-Beth Burnside elevated women's skateboarding to a new level. This trend continued into the new millennium with Amy Caron, Vanessa Torres, and Lyn-z Adams Hawkins. Presently, skateboarding competitions for women can be seen at all major skateboarding events, such as the X-games, the Gravity Games, and the Slam City Jam.

There are many female-only skate companies, sessions, and camps to help advance the female skateboarding movement. An alliance of professional female skaters has also been established. There have been two major skate films focusing on female skaters - Getting Nowhere Faster and AKA: Girl Skater.

skate culture

Skateboarding was, at first, tied to the culture of surfing. As skateboarding spread across the United States to places unfamiliar with surfing or surfing culture, it developed an image of its own. For example, the classic film short Video Days (1991)portrayed skateboarders as reckless rebels.

The image of the skateboarder as a rebellious, non-conforming youth has faded in recent years. The rift between the old image of skateboarding and a newer one is quite visible: magazines such as Thrasher portray skateboarding as dirty, rebellious, and still firmly tied to punk, while other publications, Transworld Skateboarding as an example, paint a more modern, diverse, and controlled picture of skateboarding stars. Furthermore, as more professional skaters use hip hop music accompaniment in their videos, many urban youths and hip-hop fans are drawn to skateboarding, further diluting the sport's punk image.

Films such as Dishdogz (2005) have helped improve the reputation of skateboarding youth, depicting individuals of this subculture as having a positive outlook on life, prone to poking harmless fun at each other, and engaging in healthy sportsman's competition. According to the film, lack of respect, egotism and hostility towards fellow skateboarders is generally frowned upon, albeit each of the characters (and as such, proxies of the "stereotypical" skateboarder) have a firm disrespect for authority and for rules in general. Group spirit is supposed to heavily influence the members of this community. In presentations of this sort, showcasing of criminal tendencies is absent, and no attempt is made to tie extreme sports to any kind of illegal activity

Source: wikipedia.com

trick skating

With the evolution of skateparks and ramp riding, the skateboard began to change. Early skate tricks had consisted mainly of two-dimensional maneuvers (e.g. riding on only two wheels (wheelie,a.k.a. manual), spinning like an ice skater on the back wheels (a 360 pivot), high jumping over a bar (nowadays called a "Hippie Jump"), long jumping from one board to another (often over a line of small barrels or fearless teenagers lying on their backs), and slalom.

In 1976, skateboarding was transformed by the invention of the first modern skateboarding trick by Alan "Ollie" Gelfand. It remained largely a unique Florida trick from 1976 until the summer of 1978, when Gelfand made his first visit to California. Gelfand and his revolutionary manoeuver caught the attention of the West Coast skaters and the media where it began to spread worldwide. An ollie is performed by popping the tail of the skateboard, sliding the front foot towards the nose and lifting up the back foot to level the skateboard out. This results in the skateboarder, along with his or her skateboard, lifting into the air without the aid of foot straps or the skateboarder's hands.

The ollie was reinvented by Rodney Mullen in 1981, who adapted it to freestyle skating by ollieing on flat ground rather than out of a vert ramp. Mullen also invented the ollie kickflip, which, at the time of its invention, was dubbed the "magic flip." The flat ground ollie allowed skateboarders to perform tricks in mid-air without any more equipment than the skateboard itself. The development of these complex tricks by Rodney Mullen and others transformed skateboarding. Skateboarders began performing their tricks down stair sets and on other urban obstacles - they were no longer confined to empty pools and expensive wooden ramps.

The act of "ollieing" onto an obstacle and sliding along it on the trucks of the board is known as grinding, and has become a mainstay of modern skateboarding. Types of grinds include the 50-50 grind (balancing on the front and back trucks while grinding a rail), the 5-0 grind (balancing on only the back truck while grinding a rail) the nose grind (balancing on only the front truck while grinding a rail), and the crooked grind (balancing on the front truck at an angle while grinding) among many others. There are various other grinds that involve touching both the trucks and the deck to the rail, ledge, or lip. The most common of these is the smith grind, in which the rider balances over the back truck while touching the outer middle of the board to the grinding surface in the direction from which he or she ollied. Popping and landing on the back truck and touching the inner edge of the board, i.e. popping "over", is known as a feeble grind. Boardslides, lipslides, noseslides, and tailslides are on the wooden deck of the skateboard, rather than on the trucks.

Source: wikipedia.com