Xtreme Sports

What’s the best part about skateboarding? Being able to do all the cool tricks, which in turn makes you look cool and attracts all the girls you didn’t have the nerve to talk to before. Over the years more and more tricks have been created. What with the use of skateparks and ramps there are so many things that you can do.

Early skate tricks had consisted mainly of two-dimensional maneuvers (riding on only two wheels), spinning like an ice skater on the back wheels(a 360 pivot), high jumping over a bar(nowadays called a “Hippie Jump”), long jumping from one board to another(often over a line of small barrels or fearless teenagers lying on their backs), and slalom.

In 1976, skateboarding was transformed by the invention of the first modern skateboarding trick by Alan “Ollie” Gelfand. It remained largely a unique Florida trick from 1976 until the summer of 1978, when Gelfand made his first visit to California. Gelfand and his revolutionary manoeuver caught the attention of the West Coast skaters and the media where it began to spread worldwide. An ollie is performed by popping the tail of the skateboard, sliding the front foot towards the nose and lifting up the back foot to level the skateboard out. This results in the skateboarder, along with his or her skateboard, lifting into the air without the aid of foot straps or the skateboarder’s hands.

The ollie was reinvented by Rodney Mullen in 1981, who adapted it to freestyle skating by ollieing on flat ground rather than out of a vert ramp. Mullen also invented the ollie kickflip, which, at the time of its invention, was dubbed the “magic flip.” The flat ground ollie allowed skateboarders to perform tricks in mid-air without any more equipment than the skateboard itself. The development of these complex tricks by Rodney Mullen and others transformed skateboarding. Skateboarders began performing their tricks down stair sets and on other urban obstacles, they were no longer confined to empty pools and expensive wooden ramps.

The act of “ollieing” onto an obstacle and sliding along it on the trucks of the board is known as grinding, and has become a mainstay of modern skateboarding. Types of grinds include the 50-50 grind (balancing on the front and back trucks while grinding a rail), the 5-0 grind (balancing on only the back truck while grinding a rail) the nose grind (balancing on only the front truck while grinding a rail), and the crooked grind (balancing on the front truck at an angle while grinding) among many others.

There are various other grinds that involve touching both the trucks and the deck to the rail, ledge, or lip. The most common of these is the smith grind, in which the rider balances over the back truck while touching the outer middle of the board to the grinding surface in the direction from which he or she ollied. Popping and landing on the back truck and touching the inner edge of the board, i.e. popping “over”, is known as a feeble grind. Boardslides, lipslides, noseslides, and tailslides are on the wooden deck of the skateboard, rather than on the trucks.

Apart from grinds, Flip tricks are an important set of tricks, as they are a requirement for the trick line. Flip tricks are very diverse, and can include virtual any combination of flipping, usually never flipping more times that in the 360 flip. There are varial kickflips and varial heelflips, (in 4 combinations [a hardflip is a frontside varial kickflip]).

While all these can be done in a regular stance, they can also all be done fakie, switch, or nollie. Ambidextrousness is part of skateboarding; trick lines will often be made of switch, nollie, and (sometimes) fakie, flip tricks, and switch tricks down rails or stairs are just as common as regular tricks. Flip tricks can also be done into grinds, or with a body movement, such as in a backside 180 kickflip. These again, into nollie tricks such as a nollie backside heelflip. And these, further, are linked to complicated grinds, such as a kickflip backside lipslide or a nollie heelflip noseslide.