Said the 13-year-old Rayssa Leal (in Portuguese), quoted in "They’re Olympic gold and silver medalists. And they’re 13 years old." (WaPo). She won the silver medal in first Olympic women’s street skateboarding event. The winner of the gold was Momiji Nishiya of Japan.
We were just talking about the American skateboarder, Alexis Sablone, in this post, 2 days ago. Sablone is quite a bit more than twice their age. She's 34. She came in fourth.
At 34, Sablone is everything Nishiya and Leal are not. She has a graduate degree in architecture from MIT, is an artist, a graphic designer and has created her own shoe for Converse.... She joked about recently seeing Leal’s mother at a skating contest and thinking, “I’m older than you.”...
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With regard to street skateboarding, I understand the impetus to include more recently developed ‘sports’ into the Olympic games, but I cringe at seeing that the seeming majority of these newer athletic events are ones where judges decide the winners and losers, as opposed to time clocks, scores, etc. which are more demonstrable. Surfing is another new Olympic sport which is judged (and includes the luck of having a ‘good’ wave). Reminds me of beauty contests.
Whiskeybum writes:
"Speaking of the skateboarding competition, my wife was watching the Olympics when I related the story about the Austrian women’s winner to her that was posted separately… she happened to be watching some of the coverage of the women’s skateboarding. They were showing clip after clip of the competitors falling on what appeared in most cases to be the very first move of any difficulty in their routines – sliding down a stair railing. This basic move, which I’ve seen done successfully hundreds of times on TV, videos, etc. seemed to be some kind of huge stumbling block to many of the women (to the men too? I don’t know – I saw about 10 min. of the men’s competition yesterday and didn’t recall seeing any of them fall on a railing, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen). Maybe I don’t understand the fine points about difficulty of the sport, but at the time I thought to myself ‘these are Olympic-level competitors who can’t seem to get past the first hurdle? Maybe this sport is not ready for prime-time.’"
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