Most of Andy Macdonald’s Olympic competitors were young enough to be his children. Some, in fact, were younger than his 18-year-old son Hayden. At 51, Macdonald is the oldest Olympic skateboarder in history — though that bar is somewhat low, as skateboarding has only been in the Olympics since 2021.
But most other skateboarders at the Games are still teenagers, including teammates Sky Brown (who won bronze in the women’s park event) and Lola Tambling, both 16. An elder statesman in the sport, Macdonald was winning X Games medals before many of his competitors were born. In a career that spans four decades, he’s won 23 X Games medals in vert skating and eight World Cup Skateboarding titles.
He was involved in the movement to bring skateboarding to the Olympics, one that began around 2003 or 2004, still well before many of his current competitors were born. But in the first year of Olympic skateboarding in 2021, Macdonald found himself without a qualifying spot, sitting on the outside looking in. Before the Paris Games, Macdonald, who was born and raised in Melrose, got a British passport through his father — born in Luton, a town about 35 miles north of London — with hopes of competing for Team GB.
He scraped through the qualifying competition in Budapest in June, not long before his 51st birthday, to finish 15th and earn a spot in this year’s Games. Advertisement “It was a long shot to get here from the get go,” Macdonald said, according to ESPN . “I got h.