Last summer, 13-year-old Team Great Britain skateboarding phenom Sky Brown was attempting to leap between two curved vert ramps when her board shot from beneath her and she fell 15 feet to the ground.
Brown landed head-first onto a concrete floor and was rushed to hospital. Her father, Stuart, says it was “touch and go” whether she would ever recover. But recover she did, and what was Brown’s reaction? What did she do as she lay in a hospital bed with a fractured skull, a broken arm, broken fingers and a cracked tooth? She uploaded the footage to YouTube.
The video – darkly titled My Worst Fall Yet – has now been viewed 3.4 million times, but just over a year later, Brown, who is also Nike’s youngest sponsored athlete and has been described as “unicorn” by skateboard legend Tony Hawk, is about to become the youngest athlete to ever represent Great Britain at a Summer Olympics. That says everything you need to know about her.
“Sky is one of those people for me, and this might sound like a big thing, but for me,” said Skateboard GB’s team manager, Darren Pearcy, when we interviewed him late last year, “I compare her to people like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Serena Williams. She might only be young, but that’s where I see her going.”
Brown was born in Miyazaki, Japan to a Japanese mother, Mieko, and an English father. She spends half her time in Japan and half in the family’s apartment in Huntington Beach, California, but wherever she is in the world, her days are spent surfing and skating.
“I usually get up at around 5am,” Brown said in an interview with The Times, “and I go straight to the ocean with family and friends and then after that have a good breakfast. Then do some school and then go skating. It really depends on the waves. If the waves are good then I’ll probably go surfing again or skate and then surf.”
All that time spent on a board has obviously proved worthwhile. She entered her first competition aged seven and finished in third place in the 14-and-under category. A year later, aged eight, she was the youngest person to compete at the Vans US Open, and in 2019, Brown became the first female skateboarder to perform a frontside 540 at her first X Games. In that same year she also won a bronze medal at the World Championships held in Brazil. She was 11 years old.
“When you’ve been in skateboarding a while, you see so many skateboarders and you can just sometimes tell: they’ve just got something about them and Sky is just one of those skateboarders,” said Pearcy. “She’s got something.”
Brown will be just 13 years and 23 days old when she steps out onto the Ariake Urban Sports Park to represent Team GB at the Olympics. She’ll be hoping, or maybe surreptitiously expecting, to win a medal, but, like all of the child phenom athletes she’s standing on the shoulders of, so much more is expected of her.
“When these people come along,” said Pearcy, “they change the world, they don’t just change their sport.”
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