South African skateboarding - combine business with pleasure.

DID YOU KNOW?

A number of former water catchment dams in South Africa are now popular skateboarding arenas.

 

In South Africa, skateboarding caught on in the mid-1960s, about a decade after it all began in North America.

In the beginning, some skateboarding documentaries made in the United States inspired young South Africans to break down their roller skates, find a solid plank of wood and build their own skateboards.

This resulted in angry adults being shoved off pavements and high medical bills as bones got broken, resulting in a negative attitude towards skateboarders. Then professionally-built boards came on the market, and life became a little easier. Still, those pavements were just not big enough to handle jostling pedestrians and mad teenage skateboarding South Africans.

Enter the skateboarding park. Enter all manner of protective clothing for hands, knees, heads and elbows. It became very cool to dress like Robocop and perform at the local shopping centre skate park, because you can do so much more on the board these days.

Like surfing, skateboarding in South Africa has become slick, part of a multi-billion dollar sport merchandising industry – and a lot more fun than the old days of planks on wheels. Nowadays, you get your polyurethane speedboards, your free-style boards and your mountain boards for off-tar rough experiences.

South African skateboarding is now blessed with skate parks in all its major cities. Take Wave House in Umhlanga Ridge, Durban, for instance. Wave House has a 4 000-square metre skatepark designed by the legendary Tony Hawk, winner of 10 World Skating Championships.

Indigo Skate Camp runs the Vodacom Winterslam at the Durban Beachfront in July, and the lineup of performance is just heaven on wheels.

The Gauteng province has Boogaloos and the Germiston Ramp and energy drink Red Bull holds an annual Downhill Extreme in Cape Town, where speeds of more than 100 km/h are often recorded. No more mayhem on the sidewalks of South Africa.