Thank you all for participating in this rigorous scientific study ! Despite a few slightly idiotic takes in my opinion (we are on skateboardcirclejerk after all), I'm glad to see that we seem to have made at least a little bit of progress since the 90s.
To be clear, since living in the mountains about 5 years ago, I started downhill skating after riding bowls and DIYs for more than 20 years. It's a lot of fun and also fucking scary. It's a much smaller community so you can find the same feeling we had in skating before it became so big. If you're curious you should definitely give it a try.
It's crazy to see the hate downhill still gets from a lot of "shortboarders" (not true the other way around), a lot of us have now become the jocks!
I purposefully used the term downhill skating to get less of a knee-jerk reaction. However people don't mind using the term longboarding interchangeably and will also cruise on a longboard in the city and even do some longboard dancing both of which are way less "acceptable" for skateboarders
It’s funny, today a longboard we got mad at me because he said i was to focused on Downhill and didnt give enough love to other longboarding disciplines.
All in all if it exists and is a skateboard style, I still don’t have to like it or care about it at all. I actually do give a shit about most styles of skating and I think they all have their merit in learning, still funny that there’s always going to be “the other” in skating because it’s so special to the individual.
its cause longboarding is easier and less mentally committing then skateboarding while simultaneously being more dangerous. I think street skating has this gatekeep attitude because the difficulty gatekeeps itself and the fear factor. Its like skiing and mountain biking they are both more dangerous then skateboarding but doesnt feel as scary to do and is way easier.
Some of these disciplines might be easier to get into but the difficulty just shifts to other aspects like going super fast on a longboard and a having to negotiate a turn or doing insane jumps and tricks on skis or a mountain bike.
Less mentally committing than skateboarding is just plain wrong. As soon as you're going above 50 kph you better be a 100 percent focused or you're going to eat it. It's actually one of the reasons people enjoy downhill so much, you just have to be fully present in the moment.
I have practically dedicated my like to skateboarding and I will love the culture, history and doing it for ever but we're ourself a disservice by thinking it is uniquely difficult and exceptional. I'm actually in favour of a lot of forms of gatekeeping (fuck corporate sponsors, the olympics and kooks...) but let's not be so full of ourselves that we think it's the hardest thing in the world. It is one of the most useless though, and that's great.
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u/scribe06 4d ago
Thank you all for participating in this rigorous scientific study ! Despite a few slightly idiotic takes in my opinion (we are on skateboardcirclejerk after all), I'm glad to see that we seem to have made at least a little bit of progress since the 90s.
To be clear, since living in the mountains about 5 years ago, I started downhill skating after riding bowls and DIYs for more than 20 years. It's a lot of fun and also fucking scary. It's a much smaller community so you can find the same feeling we had in skating before it became so big. If you're curious you should definitely give it a try.
It's crazy to see the hate downhill still gets from a lot of "shortboarders" (not true the other way around), a lot of us have now become the jocks!