FACTORALY - E102 SKATEBOARDS

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Skateboards started out as something for skateboarders to do when the surf wasn't up. Today it's an Olympic sport! Follow the story of these noisy, clattery, dangerous bits of wood, fibreglass and silicone on wheels here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Good morning, Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling okay, thank you very much. Good. This fine gentleman before me is Bruce Fielding, voiceover extraordinaire. And this is Simon Wells. He's kind of okay. Thank you very much. No, he's fabulous. And when we're not being fabulous with our voices for work,

we're being fabulous with our voices for fun. Bruce and I are both terrific nerds. We're also great talkers. We'll talk to anybody. Yes, about anything. So here we are, this thing here that you're listening to, which obviously you know because you've tuned in and you've seen the title. This is called factorally.

It is. Bruce and I pick a subject at random each week and we chat about it for a bit and you get to listen to us lucky you yes and you know that this one's all about skateboards indeed you do

which I know absolutely nothing I've never been on a skateboard I've never used a skateboard I've never fallen off a skateboard I've never grazed my elbows and knees off a skateboard right nothing so I've done all of those things in one fell swoop and then never done it again. So around the age of nine, I think,

I had a go on my friend's skateboard. I fell off within the first five seconds. I fractured my wrist, and I never got back on a skateboard ever again since. That's my full personal experience of skateboards. Okay. And what's funny about this subject is the fact that it's really young. It's a really young subject.

We have no Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, nothing. None of that. The etymology is dull. It's skate and board. Which is what the, well, not quite what the original skateboards were. Kind of was. They were, effectively, they were just a plank of wood with a pair of roller skates attached to the bottom. Or was it?

Because as I understand it, it started off as boxes. Ah. So you would take a box and you'd put a pair of roller skates underneath it. Now, is that something factually that you've researched or have you just been watching back to the future? No, I have actually researched it. Oh, good. And that was the origin of the skateboard. Fantastic.

And it was basically something for surfers to do when there was no surf. That's right. Yeah. So I saw this. This sort of started in the very late 40s, possibly early 50s. Some say California, some say Hawaii. But either way, yeah, surfers. who wanted to practice their surfing when there were no waves around.

Someone said, do you know what we should do? Put a board on some wheels and then we can practice our surfing on the ground. And it kind of makes sense. You know, if you watch someone skateboarding along, it does look very surfy. You know, the stance, the sort of the hands out at the side. You know, you can picture someone on a skateboard in very much a similar vein as surfing. It does kind of make sense that the one came from the other. Well, yes.

Originally, people using skateboards, because they were a surfer, didn't wear shoes. Oh, right, yes. So they did it sort of barefoot. And it was after people had kind of hurt their feet quite a lot, that they looked for a shoe. Because the original skateboards didn't have that piece of grippy stuff on it. They were just wood. Planks of wood, yeah. So you had to have grippy shoes.

Yes. Because you didn't have a grippy board. Yeah. And the most popular one in the 60s was Converse, the Chuck Taylor All-Star. Ah, right, yes. And they were massive with them skateboarders. But then, in 1965, there was a new shoe took the stand, which was called the Randy 720. What a great name for a shoe.

And it was marketed as a skateboard sneaker for sidewalk surfing. which is what they called skateboarding. I saw that, yeah, cyborg surfing. That's lovely. Yes. And it was apparently made with Randy Preen for built-in toughness. Wow. Randipine.

And it was the official sneaker of the National Skateboard Championships. Actually, I'll tell you what, I've got an ad for it for the Randy 720. Have you? Which I will put, we have a blog which is all our show notes. Absolutely. And we keep it at a place called factorily.com. factorily.com and it's my chance

to distract people for an awfully long time yeah it's an awfully long time which I will now apologise for if you have a spare day then go to factorily.com and have a deep delve after the Randy

there was also I mean it's called Randy because it was made by the Randolph rubber company I shouldn't that makes sense sure but then the van The Vandorans. How is that what Vans is short for? Jim and Paul Vandoran in 1966. Right.

They'd already been in the shoe industry for 20 years. And they'd built a shoe factory in Anaheim in California. And they built canvas and leather shoes and all sorts of things. Yeah. But then it was in the 70s, surfers became fans of vans. And then when skateboarding hit, it was a natural progression from the surfers who liked vans on the beach. to surfers who liked fans on the street.

Brilliant. That hadn't really occurred to me, but yes, that sort of sneaker, particularly the converse, is there's sort of a, if I think of skateboarders from sort of circa the 1990s, 1980s, that is very much their outfit, isn't it? It's sort of converse shoes, slightly baggy shorts. Yeah. It is all very surfery.

Absolutely, very, very surfery. Now, I hadn't realized that there were two very distinct and very separate varieties of skateboarding. I hear skateboarding, and I picture kids in skate parks doing tricks and things, you know, sort of jumping up in the air, somehow magically making their skateboard flip up and rotate and then landing back on it perfectly. That's what I think of skateboarding. Yes. But actually, that's a relatively modern variety of it, the original. skateboards and the original version of skateboarding were longboards.

Yes. So you get, you sometimes see people riding through town on a long board as a sort of a means of transportation, sometimes even now with a little electric motor and a remote control. But longboards were the first skateboards. They were longer, obviously, as the name suggests. They didn't necessarily have the little upturned bits at each end, which, you know, I found out were called kicktails. They were just flat.

They were longer, they were made of softer wood, the wheels were a bit wider and a bit more bouncy, and they were good for, you know, distance skating. Yes. It wasn't really until the 80s and early 90s that this whole thing of sort of doing tricks with your skateboard came along, and that necessitated the board to be shorter and lighter and more agile. And these two things coexist very, very separately.

Skateboarders are not necessarily long boarders, and long borders are not necessarily skateboarders. They are quite separate. Right. And there are all sorts of varieties of longboarding. There is downhill longboarding, which is a competitive sport, often sort of orchestrated by the likes of Red Bull and things like that.

You know, you see these people with wearing Lycra, they sort of look like skiers, I guess, wearing Lycra, but with sort of BMX-style helmets. Okay. They have gloves with these rigid plastic pads on their palms so that when they're going round a corner, they can squat really low and drag their hand along the ground to help them into a bend.

Are these the kind of boards? I've seen people going down like alpine roads. Yes, absolutely. And they're phenomenal. I'll put a link into the aforementioned show notes to show you some of these videos. They are just phenomenal. And this is actually sort of, you know, a professional sport.

Another variety of longboarding that's relatively recent, came along in the 2010s, I think, is longboard dancing, which is this really creative, flamboyant thing that you get these people. It's a performance art, no doubt. You know, these guys sort of going along on their longboards, and they're zigging and they're zagging and they're dancing. They're sort of hopping from foot to foot. They jump off the board and run for a few meters. They flip the board in the air. They jump back on. They dance.

They swerve. It's quite beautiful. So it's equivalent to like break dancing on wheels? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. It's a fantastic looking thing. Wow. Again, some videos will go online.

Yes. But yes, I hadn't realized that that was, like I said, I picture street skating. You know, I picture youths skating along, jumping up, sliding their board along a hand. rail or things like that. That's what skateboarding looks to me. And I just hadn't really quite twigged this entire thing of longboarding, which was actually around far longer than skateboarding. Well, what happened with skateboarding, which is quite interesting, is that because, I mean, even today, half of all the skateboarders in the USA live in California. Really?

Half. Over half. Wow. Yeah. And one of the things about homes in California is they often had swimming pools. Okay. Yes. And the swimming pools in California weren't always full because it gets a bit chilly. So you don't want the swimming pool full. You want to empty it out and make sure it's clean. Right.

For the winter. So you get these curved spaces in the swimming pool. And that's where you can do proper tricks is going up the sides of the swimming pool, back with and forwards. I don't know I'm doing this thing with my hand. No, but it helps me. You're creating a very, very large capital U with very straight sides. Exactly.

Yeah. So, which is a basic empty swimming pool. Yes. Yeah. And that led to people thinking, well, actually, we don't want to ruin the swimming pool. Maybe we should build a skate park. Yeah. So they started to build skate parks.

The first one was Surf City in Tucson, which is actually Arizona. But there are now places like the Bro Bowl and the bottom of the Statue of Liberty was a place to skate And they're actually historic parks Because they're kind of like protected Because they were original skateboarding parks Yeah, yeah There's even one in London called the ROM

The ROM Yes Where's that? It's kind of on the border of barking and Dagenham and Havering Okay, right And it was open in 1978. Gosh, how long ago was there? It's the most completely preserved concrete skate park from the early days of British skateboarding

when the craze arrived here from there. Yeah, yeah. And it's on about 8,000 square metres of land. Oh, my goodness. The ridable park is about 4,000 square meters of sculpted, Shotcrete, hollows, bowls, moguls and the iconic pool. Wow. All words that I don't understand.

No, me neither. They do lots of other things, though. They do some riding and stuff there as well, like scootering and BMX. So this thing that you've just described, this sort of capital U-shaped thing, where you sort of, you know, the skaters start at the top, they plumb it vertically down, they swoop along the bottom and they go back up the other side

and back and forth, back and forth, getting higher and higher in order to perform mid-air tricks. This is called verting. And this is a variety of skateboarding. comes from vertical skateboarding so rather than your tricks sort of being done in motion along the ground your tricks are done in the middle you know in mid air and it's called verting um and one of the most famous verters is um a fellow called tony hawk oh the comedian right not to be confused with tony hawks the comedian okay um and uh you know characters like like tony hawk

have sort of become legends in the sport you know just getting higher and higher doing more and more tricks and flips and turns and rotations and all these sorts of things. And again, I hadn't really sort of thought of that variety of skateboarding until we got to this point. But yeah, that's a massive area of skateboarding. Skateboarding actually made it into the Olympics in 2020. Yes. Again, along the ground doing flips and tricks, there are moves to include verting in the 2028 Olympics because there are there are those who say

that's the only true form of skateboarding and it's currently underrepresented but yeah fascinating there are lots of I mean I'll put a link in the show notes to all the tricks but they've got some great names like the fakey ollie the kick turn the nolly the switch backside

the hard flip the shove it the heel flip there's lots of flips lots and lots so many flips the great slides, there are grinds, there are manuals, there are all sorts of things. There's a Christ. Is there? Yes, which is the one where you come off and you put your hands to the side.

Oh, I'm crucified, there's the plasma spin. I mean, Tony Hawk actually is called Tony Hawk 900 because he's done a 900 degree spin. Yes, I saw a video of that. He was trying again and again and again to do this thing and it looks phenomenal. There's a thing called an ollie, which is where you start at the top of stairs. Yes. And you basically skate off the top of the stairs and you land on the ground at the end of the stairs. Oh, is that what an ollie is, are?

Yes. Okay. And there are people like Alan Gelfand, who's famous for doing ollies, as is Erin Yan Samoki, who's done the most ridiculous, huge flights of stairs. I don't know how they don't break their hands. ankles on knees. No, I know. It's incredible, isn't it? You see them sort of land back at ground level, and they just sink right, you know, they have such agility and such healthy knees, evidently, because they just sort of, they sink right down to their knees and then somehow stand up again

without going base over apex. Yes. As my dad would say. Actually, it's very technical as well. I sort of, again, I don't think I've really given enough credit to to people who do this. You know, I just sort of think it's kids messing around on a board with wheels. But there is so much skill. There are so many different techniques in all of this stuff. And the boards themselves are actually quite techy. You can modify your boards with different types of wheels.

The metal axles, the things that the wheels are attached to are called trucks. You can get so many different types of trucks that bend and flex and swivel and rotate in all sorts of different ways. Different lengths of parts. board, different thicknesses of board, it's also customizable. You can get things on your boards called wedges, risers, rails, different types of grippy tape for your feet. Yeah, there's so much into it. I could quite easily picture you spending a lot of time and money on this if this is your passion. Absolutely. It's quite noisy as well, isn't it? It is quite noisy, yes. Lots of clattering around. Lots of clattering. And people who use them on the, on the pavements, I don't,

I don't really approve of. Right, yeah, yeah. As, I mean, I'm not Norwegian, as you may have guessed. No, you're not. No. But if you were in Norway between 1978 and 1989, skateboarding was banned. Really?

Because it was noisy, irritating and scary for people on pavements. Wow. And the only place in Norway where you could actually use a skateboard was in a place called Frogner Park in Oslo and people were going across the border to nobody was allowed to sell skateboards or skateboarding equipment people were crossing borders and bringing them back wow amazing how interesting and that's for 11 years in the yes yeah that's that's quite a substantial ban yeah absolutely you mentioned that particular skate park in east london yeah With all of the vertical flipping stuff, the ROM.

I had a quick look at the South Bank in London. Oh, yes. As you're walking along the South Bank and you're passing Queen Elizabeth Hall, there's an area called the Undercroft, which gets an awful lot of people skating around and sort of, you know, there are slopes, there are long concrete benches that people sort of, you know, ride along the rails of that and do all sorts of tricks and things. and you get a lot of tourists sort of stopping and watching them. And I've always thought that this was a relatively modern thing. Apparently, people started using it in the early 70s, as early as 1972. Oh, wow. It wasn't purpose-built.

It sort of looks like it was, but it's been added to over the years, you know. Originally, it was just an empty space underneath the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and it had a few nice slopes, and so skateboarders started going there. And it's become more and more popular. It's actually the world's longest continually used skating space. Wow. So having started being used in 1972 and still to this day. Yes.

There's quite a lot of street art under there as well, isn't it? Loads of street art. The Southback Centre have actually preserved the space now. So there was talk at one point about redeveloping the area and building something else in its space, but the skateboarding community weren't having any of it. So in 2013, it's actually officially preserved as a skating area. I didn't, you know, I knew that there was a threat, but I didn't realize the threat had been resolved.

Yeah, apparently so. It's now actually officially preserved as a skating area. Oh, brilliant. And just nearby, this is a wonderful yet horrible story. There's something called the skateboard graveyard. I don't know if you've seen this. No. As you walk over Hungerford Footbridge, which goes from the South Bank to Embankment Station,

there are all these sort of concrete bases in the river that have the supports for the footbridge and one of them if you look over the edge one of them is often covered in broken skateboards where skateboarders at the local undercroft if they break a board they sort of ceremonially throw their board onto this platform in the Thames

and that's where their skateboards go to rest and this has a really sad origin Apparently a group of skateboarders in 1999 were walking across the Hungerford Footbridge at night after skating at the undercroft. And they were attacked and one of them was actually pushed into the Thames and sadly passed away. So this is sort of in memoriam to that particular skateboarder that, you know, people started throwing their disused and broken skateboards onto this platform in the Thames in memory of him. I'm going to have to have a look for this. Have a look. As you walk across from South Bank to North, I think it's the first platform on your right. Yeah, it's always got broken skateboards on it.

I'll put pictures of it up on the show notes. Would you be interested in hearing about the Marine Corps' use of skateboards? Obviously, I would. So they had a plan called Urban Warrior. effectively you understand that marines are used to fighting in the field on battlegrounds sure but battlegrounds nowadays are not nice open fields right their cities and towns yes okay so they came up with this idea of urban warrior in the 90s right and it was a test by the marine call a war fighting laboratory to test the effectiveness of Marines fighting in large open areas

and it was kind of there's all sorts of obstacles to overcome when you're doing that there's booby traps and all sorts of things and they thought one of the things they could do is to test a number of tactical ideas including the combat skateboard oh my goodness so what they is they bought out of shops they bought skateboards but they used them to detect things like tripwires in building so they would send them in first to detect a tripwire in case they there was a mine. Oh, they just sort of shoot the skateboard off without the person on. Or to draw sniper fire as movement. Right. And then they sort of thought, okay, we need to design a uniform that goes with this urban way of working or fighting. And so they came up with like a uniform for Marines on skateboards. And they realized very quickly that sort of skateboard type clothing doesn't work.

And marine type clothing doesn't. work. So they had to come up with a new type of clothing that had like built in knee knee protection and wasn't that baggy. I'll put a picture on the show. It is absolutely fascinating. That's fantastic. They could they could maneuver these things inside buildings. They had like a whole different jacket. It's very cool. It kind of makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, if, you know, if if the police force can go around on bicycles and even segways. Yes. Then sure, why shouldn't the Marines go around on skateboards. Yeah.

Marine on a skateboard. Marine boarding. Oh, well, if you think about the origin of it being a surfboard. Sure, yeah. Then they're Marines. It's just coming full circle, isn't it? That's brilliant. I can imagine that being quite useful, actually.

You're sort of squatting down on your skateboard and zooming through the enemy fire. Well, yeah, you've got extra speed, haven't you? So you're not just, you know, you're going faster than you would if you were running, especially if you're going downhill or along a flat, flat. piece of land. Yes. And it's, it's lightweight. You can just pick it up and strap it to your back. Yeah. It's not like a, not like a bicycle. You can just sort of pop it on your back. Yeah. What an interesting idea. I wonder if it'll take off. Well, they took over parts of Chicago, San Francisco, and Oakland in 1999 to test it. Oh, this was as long ago as that.

Yeah. I thought this was going to be a recent idea. No, the, the program was called Urban Warrior 99. Brilliant. Well, who to thunk it? I know. This isn't going out on June the 21st, is it? No. Because that's National Skateboarding Day. Is it? Yes. Ah, I knew that, actually.

I make reference to that in my records section. Oh, good. Well, talking of which, is it time for Guinness? I think it probably is, yeah. Guinness zero or do you want to go to full fat? Full fat. Absolutely. Okay.

So, Simon, at this point in the show, we often discuss. world records. We do. Are there any... There must be loads of skateboarding. Are there any? There are so many.

There's for every single flip and trick you can think of in skateboarding. There's an accompanying Guinness record for the most number of those done in a certain amount of time. A huge field, so I'm not going to go into all of that. But I've picked out a few novelty ones. Let's start with the world's largest skateboard. Okay, can I have a guess? Yes.

do. Okay. Now, I'm guessing it's not just for one person. I'm guessing there's going to be more than one person on it. Very good. So I'm guessing it's going to be 55 feet. Oh, that's actually a bit of an overshoot. Oh, is it? Yeah, but you're in the right sort of ballpark. Oh, and skate park? Skate park. Hey. Um, 37 feet and seven inches or metric, 11 and a bit meters long, eight feet wide, three feet high. And it'll look three feet high. Yes, three feet high. Still relatively low to the ground, but, you know, in skateboard terms, it's roughly, it's a scale thing. It's 12.5 times the size of a regular skateboard.

And yes, multiple people can ride it at once. And it's a pure novelty, but it works. It's mobile. It's agile. There's a video of the creator of it, a couple of guys from America, obviously. Of course. This was built in 2009, and, yeah, there are videos of these guys and their friends riding on this thing. They sort of start at the top of a hill and down it goes.

Completely unsteerable, you know, people sort of jump off it when they suddenly realize it's going too fast or, you know, about to head off a cliff or something. But, yeah, that's the world's biggest skateboard. The Guinness World Record for the longest ramp jump. So again, you sort of, in a Red Bull style kind of event, you know, you skate downhill, you reach a ramp, you shoot off the ramp, a little bit, sort of ski jumpy. 79 feet, 24 metres. That's a big jump. It's quite a big jump. This was achieved in 2004 by an American, again, called Danny Way in California.

There's something called a manual, which is a skateboard trick where you, oh, this is going to be. hard to describe on an audio thing, but essentially you lift up the front end of the skateboard and you balance all your weight on the back wheel. Okay. So you... Oh yes, it's sort of like a wheelie? Like a wheelie, but stationary. Okay.

Exactly that. Someone did this for a period of time. Take a guess. Two hours. Close. Two hours, 55 minutes and 22 seconds. Almost three hours. Just standing there.

Just standing there, balanced on the... the back wheel. Wow. So sort of slightly... So without the back of the skateboard touching the ground? Without the back of the board touching the floor. Exactly. Not even now. So this was in 2017, fella from America called Brandon Gonzalez. Yeah, just under three hours balancing on the back wheel of a skateboard.

Incredible. Wow. Well, I mean, you'd have to have a ridiculously strong core and legs and ankles and stuff. I can't even imagine sort of standing on one foot for that long, let alone. alone balancing on the back wheel of a skateboard. Wow. Incredible. And then the last one, which I said mentions the International Skateboarding Day, June the 21st.

On June the 21st, 2017, the largest skateboarders parade took place in Manila, in the Philippines. 1,108 skateboarders all rode their skateboards along in this parade. Do you know, I thought it was going to be more. Did you? imagine the noise though you you said how noisy it is when one skateboarder goes past 1,108 of them in a parade all on their boards gosh there are many many others but those are the ones that that caught my attention cool So shall we skate off?

Yes, let's skate off, let's... Daffy? No, that's something else, isn't it? Goofy. Goofy? There's a goofy. Apparently, if you stand on your board with your left foot forward, you're riding regular, right foot forward is riding goofy. And I think that's because there was a cartoon featuring Goofy

where he was actually on a skateboard. Oh, and he was riding that way out. And he had the wrong foot on the front of the skateboard, so that's why it's called a goofy. Oh, that's great. I love that. well there you go let's goof off yes well thank you so much for listening I hope your lives

have been enriched by learning all about skateboards your knowledge of skateboarding is surely greater now than it was half an hour ago well if if the good folks at home

have enjoyed this episode what could they possibly do Bruce we would we would love you to leave us a brilliant five star review because you think this is so good absolutely

and if you could comment as well that would be very helpful and explain why you liked this particular episode or indeed any of the factorily episodes yeah there's a whole load of them to choose from there are a lot um you could make sure that you don't miss another one by subscribing and and making sure that every thursday morning you wake up with a smile on your face because you will have heard another episode of factorily has landed indeed um or you can tell your friends i mean you must have no difference you must have young friends who are mad about skateboarding for example yes they agree Yeah, they can all listen to this and go, oh, they've got that wrong. They've got that wrong. Yeah, and if we do get it wrong, then you can email us. Well, you can go on a Facebook page and tell us at Factorily. Or you can write to hello at factorily.com and tell us what we got wrong. You certainly can.

We would love to learn more. If you've got personal stories of skateboarding and you know infinitely more than us, then please write and tell us. Well, thank you so much for coming along and listening to two old men waffling on about a sport. that they know nothing about. Please join us again next time for another fun-filled factual episode of Factorily.

Goodbye. Ovo.