History Of Skateboarding

Skateboarding:
                                Skateboarding may be a young sport, but its origins are shrouded in mystery. No one knows for sure who invented it and where. It probably began sometime in the late 1950s on the surfing beaches of California, when someone hit on the idea of attaching a pair of roller skates to a surfboard. Skateboarding at first would have been no more than a kind of “pavement surfing” – the nearest thing to real surfing when the waves weren’t high enough. That would also explain why the first skate boarders went barefoot.


The First Boom:
                        The first manufactured skateboards come onto the market in 1965. Soon, the first competition events appeared freestyle, slalom, downhill, high jump and long jump. Skateboarding was starting to develop as a sport in its own right. In the mid 1970s skaters began to try new routes along drainage channels and up the slopes around buildings. This opened up a whole new world of tricks.Skateboarding developed quickly, and it wasn’t long before the first skateboard in mind. Pools were built rounded sides, and there were other layouts for bank and freestyle skating.

In the early 1980s there was a sudden slump in popularity. Skate parks closed their gates, board manufacturers stopped production, and skateboard magazines turned to BMX and roller skating. The sport was becoming unpopular with general public. You might have thought this would have stifled it, but if anything the opposite happened. Skateboard culture became smaller but more committed, and entered one of its most creative phases.

 Skateboarding soon developed into a new method of transport. Skaters would tackle any rout, mount any obstacle that came their way. They would use their board anywhere and everywhere they could. In the early 1980s the art of street skating came about. The street skater was completely independent of artificial layouts. Tricks that only vert skaters had used were adapted to the street. Street ollies,  slide ,n, rolls and kerb grinds are the classic street moves, and all of them  came from vert skating.

 In the late 1980s skateboarding was at last accepted as a real sport and now it can no longer be dismissed as a passing fad. There is a lucrative professional circuit both in the United States and in Europe, and spectators can be numbered in their tens of thousands