From our special correspondent in Paris – The sprawling skate park set up in Paris’s Place de la Concorde was packed with spectators on Sunday who came to cheer on some of the 2024 Olympics’ youngest champions. Unphased by the unrelenting – though welcome – sunshine, teenage Japanese skaters Coco Yoshizawa and Liz Akama won the gold and silver medals, with Brazilian icon and crowd favourite Rayssa Leal snatching bronze with her final trick.
In the centre of Paris’s largest public square stands the more than 3,000-year-old Luxor Obelisk, dragged in the 19th century from its temple in Thebes and shipped down the Nile and across the seas to France to be raised in the capital’s Place de la Concorde, where royalty and revolutionaries in their turns fell beneath the guillotine’s blade. By now, it should be clear: Paris doesn’t really go in for half measures.
Gone are the grey skies and driving rain. Now, the last clouds hang white and ragged in the blazing blue sky. The unflinching sun is already high overhead when the teenage competitors glide into the vast concrete park built to accommodate one of the newest entries into the Olympic Games – skateboarding. Handrails, stairwells, wrought iron fences – all the jagged geometry of a city's streets have been dissected and rearranged on this lunar landscape, grey except for a few dabs of the 2024 Paris Olympics’ official pastels.
To the left, the Eiffel Tower. To the right, the Luxor Obelisk, capped in gold. The Grand Palais behind, a single French tricolour floating in a far-too-distant breeze. And glimpsed through the trees, the Seine, incandescent beneath the sun.
It’s hard to imagine that just yesterday, the men’s skateboarding was shunted to Monday due to rain. The stands are full on this shining Sunday, and the spectators are beside themselves. The Brazilians are out in force to support 16-year-old icon Rayssa Leal, who won silver in Tokyo – the first Games where skateboarding was admitted as an official sport.
Since then, the competition has grown fiercer – and younger. Of the 22 athletes competing across the different heats – the word seems appropriate – barely a handful are older than 20, with Thailand’s Vareeraya Sukasem just 12 years old. The crowd is supportive, but it’s an immense amount of pressure for a group of athletes barely into their teens, and more than one girl leaves the park with tears of frustration in their eyes after a fumbled trick sends them skidding across the unfeeling concrete.
Speaking after the finals, 19-year-old US skater Poe Pinson – who finished fifth – said that the sport’s inclusion in the Games had been controversial among some older skaters.
“I feel like in the Olympic world, especially now, a lot of them are brought into it as an Olympic sport – okay let’s train, let’s get better – and they’re just being pushed all the time to like, learn this new trick, do it 150 times, get it down,” she said. “I kind of come from a little bit of a different background in skateboarding where I’ve just kinda been obsessed with it my whole life on my own, and didn’t really have any guidance with it.”
Pinson, whose bulky headphones and blasé attitude made her an early fan favourite, said she believed it was important that the values that first drew her to skateboarding weren’t lost in the sport’s transition to the Olympic stage.
“I feel [my role is] just sharing the different parts of skateboarding, which is literally like making friends and camaraderie, because at the end of the day it’s never really that serious – even though it is,” she said.
Despite the high stakes and baroque backdrop, the mood is casual. The athletes’ uniforms would look completely at home at your local skate park – baggy tees, crop tops and cargo pants. The commentator would too, from the sounds of the things.
"Skills! Heavy skills on display," he said at one point, the delight palpable in his voice all through the afternoon’s events. In the next arena over, the BMX freestyle is under way – every few moments, cyclists launch themselves off the violet slopes to hang, blurred beyond recognition, in the shimmering air.
While the skaters are warming up – a phrase that, at this point in the day, seems intended to personally victimise the sweating crowd – the DJ blasts everything from contemporary club bangers to nineties classics. The megascreens are requisitioned for an on-the-whole unsuccessful bout of karaoke, dutifully displaying the somewhat superfluous lyrics to the chorus of Gala Rizzatto’s eternal hit “Freed from desire” (“Na na na na na na na, na na na, na na na”).
Once the finals begin, the skaters have two 45-second stretches to score as many points off the ramps, slopes, rails and stairs of the skate park as they can. After that, they have five chances to land a single trick of their choice, with the two highest-scoring attempts adding to their final score – and chances of a medal.
It’s a format that pushes them to be daring, and many soaring attempts ended in the teenage skaters falling from their boards. Each time, they rose to their feet, ready to fly again.
The Japanese skaters dominated, but you wouldn’t know it from the crowd. Rayssa Leal’s name was chanted almost endlessly throughout the afternoon as the young Brazilian’s fans cheered their star towards another medal. A series of stumbles almost kept her from the podium; her last trick locked her into third place, and from the screams of her supporters you would have thought she’d won the gold.
But that medal was won handily by 14-year-old Japanese skater Coco Yoshizawa, who fought her 15-year old compatriot Liz Akama for first place before surging ahead with a seemingly weightless slide down a rail. It was the first time her composure broke all afternoon – she spread her arms to the sky above and rode towards the cheering throngs, her face transfigured. She took her place at the head of the podium, the rising sun of the Japanese flag draped around her teenage frame, the gold metal molten in the sunlight.
