Disregard for cool

The world needs to hear this: skateboarding isn’t fucking cool.

With the announcement that skateboarding is now going to be in the Olympics and various celebrities skateboarding around their private jets before they board them to get away from their fans, I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone of the worth of standing on a plank on wheels. Skateboarding is actually so tragic that it should make someone dressed as a Storm Trooper at a cosplay convention look like Johnny Depp. And he is the coolest man on earth, known fact.

I am sure to the outside world that skateboarding looks cool. It has an underground vibe to it, breaking into places, skateboarding, being arrested and then being released from custody only to do it all over again the next weekend, before going back to a job you hate on Monday because you spent so much time skating during school that you failed every exam you did and ended up writing for a blog that screams at the world, that got a little too personal at the end there.

However cool skateboarding may look from the fringes of it, it is far from cool. In fact, I put it to you that it is just as geeky and nerdy as comic books used to be before superheroes infected the world’s every screen.

Most skateboarders have facts in their brain that would leave a comic collector thinking they haven’t taken their hobby seriously enough. For example, I can tell you that Chris Haslam skated to The Cardigans, My Favourite Game in Almost Round 3, he opened that video with his section and broke the mould for what someone with a beard can do on a skateboard. I can also tell you that Johnny Rotten introduced everyone in Flip Sorry. That was a wonderful time to be alive. When he said Geoff Rowley was a vegan, “likes his pussy”, the world was a better place.

For me, the geeky facts about skateboarding have always been from the skate videos. For others, they are shoes or the boards. Some people can tell you every shape of a board a pro has ever put out into the world, while others can tell you every colour of shoe a pro has made. It is this complete and utter disregard for cool that makes skateboarding about as relevant as Lord of the Rings.

Just because celebrities are now skating and “making it look cool”, it doesn’t mean that it is. In fact, if you truly love skateboarding, you will know just how unfuckingcool it is. Yes, OK, there is blood, scars and pain and Louie Barletta once said that pain is weakness leaving the body, which is cool, but look at Louie, he is one of the biggest fucking geeks in skateboarding. You don’t have a bowl cut and a collection of cardigans like his if you’re trying to be in vogue, or in Vogue.

What I am trying to say is that, now skateboarding is in the Olympics, other, newer little hipster cunts are going to jump on a bandwagon that they have no idea about. It doesn’t matter who sponsors the “sport” or which celebrity does it – any true skateboarder is not cool. They may look cool, they may dress cool, they may even sound cool, but underneath all of that, there is a skate nerd longing to tell you that Tony Alva used to buy his Vans one at a time and popularised wearing different coloured shoes as a result, or why the size of your trucks matters.

And if you don’t know what trucks are, do yourself a favour and don’t find out.

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