Power ranking every single sport at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics
By Nick Villano
18. Skateboarding
We talked about a lot of the aspects of the X Games sports when we talked about BMX Freestyle, but skateboarding is different. It’s the most popular of the “extreme” skating sports. Superstars like Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen laid the foundation for today’s skateboarding. Nobody thought this would become an Olympic sport when most Midwestern towns were rushing laws to pass so skateboarding would become illegal.
Today, cities are building their own skate parks to give kids a place to go, and this sport is a must-watch at the Olympics. It’s just a 180 from where it was even 20 years ago. Skateboarding in the mainstream was probably not the goal, but it truly did help the sport tenfold.
Skateboarding at the Olympics is broken down into two events, competed by both men and women: park and street. Street is meant to mimic the skating habits of those going down a straight stretch, including stairs, rails, and ledges. Meanwhile, park isn’t necessarily a traditional skate park with verts and ramps. This one is a giant bowl structure that connects in a circle with a ramp in the middle.
After a somewhat controversial end to the Tokyo Olympics, the scoring system has changed. Now, in street, judges will score each skater’s best run out of 100, then they will judge their two best tricks of either run out of 100. It becomes a total score out of 300. In park, the overall run is scored out of 100. It’s also great because the runs are relatively quick. They aren’t too quick like fencing, but they last between 45 seconds and a minute. It’s fast enough that spectators can’t look away but not so fast that they miss something.