Cool, so you choose to overlook the case of me making the attempt to get it right in the same post and just focused on the wrong one? Like, probably 99% of cases of ‘misgendering’ it’s a genuinely innocent slip/mistake underpinned, in this particular case, by the fact that a female skate contest is what’s being talked about here, so it’s natural to slip into pronouns of her. Nobody is deliberately going out of their way to offend them.
Instead of educating me or Ciaran it just looks like you’re being obtuse. I asked a genuine question above about whether I got it right or not. I wanted to educate myself on it.
It would have been cool to actually discuss the point of debate I made rather than just point out my mistakes. Quite frankly, this all feeds back to my original point about Alana’s protest or whatever they want to call it. The Olympics is a platform in which they could have really made an impactful difference. Imagine if young non-binary skaters saw them make a serious run in the competition and thought “wow, this person is just like me, and they skate and rip!”. That would have been so rad and showed the world that non-binary people can be athletes too.
Instead, it just feels puerile, self-serving, disrespectful towards the event and its history, as well the other competitors. Honestly, the only people who are really going to know about this issue are a select few skateboarders and some LGBT people - hardly effective I would say…
Was thinking about this the other day. The street comps have enshrined rail and stair skating as the proving ground for competitive skating, and reward that stuff more highly, but (for me at least) manual tricks are insanely difficult. There is so much opportunity for the trick to not go right. How would the judges reward a really tech manual trick? I remember Street League had a more varied course when it first materialised, with a ‘Tech section’ or whatever, but that’s fallen by the wayside over the years.
I think it would be quite underwhelming, like ESPN’s (?) attempt to capitalize on the popularity of BATB a few years ago. Didn’t quite work at all. Wasn’t there a Manny Mania contest series a few years back? What happened with it? I mean, think about how many attempts any skater would have on a 15 stair rail before they’re too wrecked to continue compared with the hours that some will spend on the techest manny combo, which explains why big rails and gaps are the go-to for TV contests. I know exactly what you’re getting at though.
Was there any reason given why vert or mega ramp wasn’t adapted for the Olympics?
This feeds into the perennial issues with contests full stop - in the 80s it meant most contests (prior to Hawk’s meteoric rise) were dominated by who could do the biggest backside air the most amount of times . These days it’s stairs/rails that are the most rewarded ‘stunts’ for want of a better word.
Contests, particularly mainstream directed ones like the Olympics rely on spectacle to appeal to a non specialist audience. Even more so in hard to understand things like skateboarding.
Fastest, longest, highest, most dangerous, most turns etc etc - mainstream embrace of all sports will rely on this superlative perspective for obvious reasons.
It’s sad though because as everyone else has said, the hegemony of the handrail gets tedious quick. Only way to avoid it I guess it to have contests that focus on different aspects of the whole course and force skaters to do things on all of them.
That’s not going to happen in high stakes, big sponsorship, big money, we want blood comps though.
Btw I found the manny mania clips that Andy Evans made complete with Avi in costume with his ‘big arm’ - pretty funny
Looks to me like a massive public acknowledgement that the support from national sports bodies for funding skateparks is terrible.
Obvs they didn’t mean this in the Metro, but it is.
So many small parks which just can’t cater for locals. Would love to finally see some parks on US/Scandi scale and less of this 200k 4ft quarter/driveway/ledge setup…
I’m pretty sure that the UK manny mania thing ran for 3 consecutive years.
Proper fun being involved in those but to a non-skating audience they’d be like watching dry paint get drier
Yeah, I think you’re right. I went to one and it was a laugh. Only thing was it was in a dark old warehouse set up and the sun was blazing outside. So, after a bit of a watch and a bit of a skate, I fucked off down the beach.
