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Sky Brown is an Olympic medallist again, and this time she did it the hard way. She was in hospital the day she arrived at these Olympic Games, getting an MRI scan on her dislocated shoulder. Then, in qualifying here in the searing Parisian heat on Tuesday, the bone briefly popped out of its socket again when she fell.
“I ran down to her and she said, ‘Daddy, it’s come out’,” said her father, Stuart Brown, who is by her side at every competition. “As we were getting out she said, ‘I think it’s gone back in’. She didn’t want to show [pain] because she was so afraid of being pulled out of the contest [by competition doctors].”
While her competitors practised and refuelled, Brown spent the two hours before this skateboard park final with Team GB physios who massaged her shoulder and worked her arm, then iced it and taped it back up so it wouldn’t yield. She will need surgery when she returns home to Los Angeles.
Given all that, and having torn the medial collateral ligament in her knee in May while filming an advert for her new shoe (Nike SB Sky Brown Zoom Pogo Plus Skate Shoes, RRP £79.95), it is all the more remarkable that she not only competed here at La Concorde but won an accomplished bronze to go with the bronze she won in Tokyo, when she was only 13.
Brown held the silver medal position in the last round before Japan’s Cocona Hiraki pinched it with the very last run of the competition. Above them on the scoreboard, the new women’s Olympic champion is the pioneering 13-year-old Arisa Trew, an Australian prodigy who has been landing groundbreaking tricks for a year now.
Brown, the reigning world champion, might have added another layer of difficulty to her last run had she not held a little back on the – perhaps wise – advice of her father. “I wanted to bring out another trick, another few tricks, but Dad didn’t want me to. [He] wanted to keep it a little safe, didn’t want to hurt it even more. I did the best I could do.”
The 16-year-old Brown is exactly the sort of athlete the International Olympic Committee hoped to attract when it introduced more “urban” sports. She has more than a million Instagram followers and more than 2 million on TikTok. She has her own song, her own shoe and even her own Barbie doll.
She is young and fearless, with international appeal and a multinational hinterland, born in Japan to a Japanese mother and her British father, who inspired her to take up skateboarding, while growing up in California and representing Britain. “Change or be changed,” goes the mantra of IOC president Thomas Bach, and Brown is the epitome of his Olympic evolution.
She showed her spirit here. Injuries are becoming an essential part of the Sky Brown story. She suffered a horrific crash in the build-up to Tokyo after falling from a height, and here in Paris it seemed like her race might have been run. She was visibly upset after her fall in qualifying but somehow regrouped and put it together in the final.
Wearing black clothes over white shoes on a sparkling white board, Brown made a middling start, scoring 80.57 in the first of her three runs in a competition of speed, height and skill in which only your best score counts. It placed Brown fourth of eight.
Trew leapt to the top of the pile with a score of 90.11 in the second round, but Brown responded, and she finished with a kickflip-indy to whoops from the crowd – the trick she dramatically landed at the third attempt in Tokyo. A score of 91.60 propelled her into second place behind Hiraki.
Trew went even better, scoring a giant 93.18 with her final run and pushing Brown down to third. She took one final pep talk from her dad – “the score doesn’t matter, suck it in and enjoy it” – and then she launched, performing the same routine with an added injection of speed that helped her to fit in one more trick at the finish. When the buzzer went, she leapt out of the bowl and collapsed in an exhausted heap.
Her score of 92.32 lifted her above Hiraki for silver, but the Japanese skater still had one run to go, and she finished with a punch of the air, knowing this was her best yet. A score of 92.63 nudged Brown back to bronze, with Hiraki taking silver just as she did at her home Games three years ago.
Brown was happy. “This journey has been crazy since Tokyo,” she beamed. “This Paris one, just watching the level change and knowing we are all pushing boundaries, it’s just been really cool.
“It’s definitely nerve-wracking with that big audience out there, but I love it. That’s what keeps me hyped up. It was a little scary, just falling on my shoulder on my last run and then going to the finals knowing I had to kind of send it. I fought through it and gave it my best.”
Brown will go home for her shoulder operation and then set about getting a driving licence. “Still working on that,” she said.
One thing at a time, although in Brown’s case, it’s two. She missed out on qualifying for the Olympic surfing competition by just one place, which might have been for the best given the event took place 10,000 miles away in Tahiti. She is determined to make it at her hometown games in four years’ time.
“I want to go to LA and be a double Olympian in both surfing and skating. Every time I lose or every time I win I learn a lot every day. I can bring all of that knowledge with me.”
