Olympic Skateboarder Sky Brown On Success, Surfing And Beating ‘The Big Boys’
Sky Brown radiates success. Even early on a spring morning at a chilly skatepark under London’s busy Westway flyover, Team GB’s youngest-ever Olympic medallist is beaming. Her bright, breezy demeanour isn’t even fuelled by coffee. Why? She’s only 15 years old.
It’s been a busy week, too. She’s flown to London from her Los Angeles home for a packed schedule of engagements, including a big skating stunt with TAG Heuer that took place on March 26.
This saw Brown performing tricks on a half-pipe that was wedged between two double-decker buses and floating on the River Thames, against the backdrop of Tower Bridge. ‘It’s great to be here in London and that ramp was in the coolest spot,’ she tells ELLE UK. ‘It’s definitely the sickest place I’ve ever skated.’
From the current world champion, who won bronze at the Tokyo Olympics and is heading to the 2024 games in Paris this summer, that is saying a lot. Brown’s meteoric rise began when she was just four years old, when her father shared a video of her skateboarding, which swiftly went viral. Since then, she’s travelled the world, amassing medals and breaking records as she goes.
Despite this early success (not to mention 1.3m Instagram followers), she’s remarkably free of ego, laughing off compliments and answering questions with youthful exuberance. She assures me that she still does ‘normal 15-year-old stuff’, absent-mindedly rolling her feet back and forth on a board as we chat in a tiny skate shop.
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How does someone so young cope with it all? ‘It’s not pressure for me, it’s what I do for fun,’ she says. ‘I’m nothing but thankful that this is my lifestyle. This is what I love to do. It’s my playground. Every time I compete, I don’t really care about the results even though, you know, the gold is what I want. I just want to do my best and show my style of skateboarding.’
Other than remarkably successful, Brown’s specific style is distinctive. She’s known for acing tricks like the Japan Air, in which the skater pulls the board up behind their back with their knees pointed down (as gravity-defying as it sounds).
‘I like to make skateboarding look beautiful,’ she says. ‘To me, it’s like a dance routine and I just want to make it look flow-y but powerful as well. That’s what I want to show when I’m getting air and doing my tricks.’
Remarkably, she doesn’t have a coach, but rather learns tricks from YouTube. Her father, Stuart, a long-time skater and surfer himself, has also had a major influence. ‘My dad has helped me so much, he’s basically my coach. I couldn’t do it without him,’ she says.
Recently, that help has extended to surfing as well as skating, and each sport has helped her with the other, she explains. ‘I always say it’s like ramen and ice cream. If you have too much ramen you want some ice cream. After you skate you need to cool down. Or the opposite if it gets too cold in the water,’ she laughs.
Brown only narrowly missed out on her ambitious goal to represent Team GB in surfing as well as skateboarding at the 2024 Olympic Games, recently failing to qualify at the ISA World Surfing Games in Puerto Rico. She calls the experience ‘a little bit of a bummer’, but is characteristically optimistic.
‘I learnt so much that I can now bring to the future,’ she says. ‘The goal for the LA 2028 Summer Olympics is two golds for GB – skating and surfing. It’s a big dream but I’m trying my best.’
This resilience has been essential to success in a traditionally male-dominated sport, she says, reminiscing about the earliest days. ‘I would go to the skate park and there would be big boys there all the time. I’d be this little girl trying to get in,’ she says.
‘People would be like “what is she doing here?” and “you don’t belong here”. Honestly, those kinds of comments gave me more of a fire to prove them wrong. I didn’t want boys to have all the fun.’
She’s distilled that spirit into an upcoming book, The Life-Changing Magic of Skateboarding. This part-memoir, part-guide will provide practical tips to help readers get onto their boards, and its author hopes it will resonate with young girls in particular.
The TAG Heuer half-pipe that floated on the Thames is now being donated to a charity-run skate park in Nottingham, having been signed by Brown. It’s heartening to think of young people finding their own skating style in the tracks of this prodigious young athlete.
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