The 30th edition of the modern Summer Olympics is just around the corner, and while the majority of events at Paris 2024 would be recognisable(ish) to athletes past, a raft of extreme sports have joined the fun over the last decade. Team GB is never one to miss the party, with its young stars going for gold in events like skateboarding, BMX freestyle and lead climbing, lifting fans from sport's alternative wing and landing them on the world stage. The gold is still as bright and the crowds are just as loud, but one thing's for sure: this isn't your dad's Olympiad.
Sky Brown Age: 16 Hometown: Los Angeles Key Event: Women’s park skateboarding To see Sky Brown on a skateboard is to witness nature being bent to her will. As she flies out of a bowl at Baysixty6, a west London skate park, the 15-year-old reached behind to grasp the board between her legs for a clean melon grab – and then she does it again. As she rolls back to her starting position on the bowl’s rim, she turns to her dad, Stuart.
“I want to go higher,” she says, a megawatt smile on her face. Brown was 13 when she competed at the Covid-delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021, breaking a record held since 1928 to become the youngest athlete to represent Great Britain. She remembers her bronze medal-winning run with total clarity, recalling the kickflip indy grab she failed to land on her first two attempts.
“I fell on my trick twice,” she says. “That never really happened to me before. I landed it pretty good in practice.
But having all my support around me and my dad there cheering me on and telling me that ‘no [one] contest will define you’ really made me want to win.” By her final attempt, she needed a perfect run to secure a medal. She landed the kickflip.
“It was, like, holy moly!” Since Tokyo, Brown has defended her X Games title in 2022 and became world champion in 2023, cementing herself as one of the most influential skateboarders in the world. You can even see the Brown effect here at Baysixty6: its entrance is emblazoned with a mural of the skateboarder mid-flight. “That’s why I went to the Olympics,” Brown says.
“Because I wanted to inspire. It just keeps on growing, especially for women. I think the gender gap is really closing up.
” More and more young girls are turning up at the skate park than ever before, many citing Brown as the reason they shirked the fear and picked up a board. At its heart, skateboarding is a community sport – not just about encouraging each other to go higher and harder, but being there when your fellow riders come back down. When Brown successfully completed her Olympic run, she waited for her score in the arms of her competitors – and friends – in a group hug.
On a typical day, Brown gets up at 5am and heads straight for the sea near her Los Angeles home, where the California weather is kinder to her favourite pastimes. “No one’s really out and you get to watch the sun come up, it’s pretty perfect,” she says. She surfs for a few hours before clocking in online for school, stopping by the skate park afterwards to practise.
And then, if conditions permit, she takes her surfboard to the beach again. “I can go for hours and hours and hours. It’s not like training for me.
” She was hoping to be the first British Olympian to compete in both surfing and skateboarding, but that hope was extinguished in Puerto Rico in March after Brown narrowly failed to qualify for Team GB at the ISA World Surfing Games. “Missing that one spot was definitely a little sad,” Brown admits, but she knows that dream hasn’t fully disappeared – it’s only been postponed. “I got that close and I’ve never competed at that high a level before.
I competed against the best and made it through a lot of rounds. I’m really proud of myself and I’ve learned so much in that event. Now I’ve just got to bring it to [the Games in] LA 2028.
” Brown’s training for Paris is well underway, even if she doesn’t call it that. “I’ve not perfected all my tricks yet, but I’m working on it and working on going higher, grinding longer and getting more power,” she tells me. She’s still refining her repertoire of tricks for the competition.
“Right now, I really like doing the stalefish,” she says, describing a big air trick where you grab the board and bend your knees so that your legs are almost parallel to the deck. “I really put my knee down and arch my back and..
.” she trails off. “I don’t know, I like to make my skating beautiful, like art.
” Brown often falls back on the word “beautiful,” true to her view of skateboarding as a creative discipline as much as it is a competitive sport . Under her feet, the board is her brush, painting lines that ride the arch of the bowl and twist and curl back in on themselves. “I work on making my tricks as perfect as possible, making them look as artistic and as beautiful as possible.
” Going to Paris as the world champion, Brown is a favourite for gold. The desire to win doesn’t consume her, though. She remembers Tokyo for that blistering kickflip, of course, but also for the TikToks she made with Japanese surfer Kanoa Igarashi, and the basketball player she met in the Olympic Village who towered over her.
There’s more to sport than winning, especially in skateboarding. “I believe in myself,” she says. “But honestly, I just want to do my best.
I just want to show the world my skating and my style, and show how pretty it is. That’s all I want to do.” – Iana Murray Kieran Reilly Age: 22 Hometown: Newcastle Upon Tyne Key Event: BMX Freestyle When Kieran Reilly landed the world’s first triple flair in January 2022 – three backflips and a 180° rotation – he seared his name into the BMX record books.
“People were saying I looked ill all the time because I was so nervous, and then as soon as I landed the trick, all the blood rushed back,” he laughs. “When I think I’m scared of a trick now, I think back to that, and I’m like, actually, I’m not that scared.” Not that BMX’s extreme heights and breakneck speeds can’t be scary.
At the age of 11, Reilly sliced his chin open during his first competition. The bloody accident might have put other kids off. “As weird as it sounds, crashes add to the motivation,” he says.
“It’s like, I’ve dug this deep now, I need to make the crashes worth something.” Even among the adrenaline junkies on the pro BMX circuit, Reilly is known for pursuing tricks no one else dares attempt. But, as a BMX content creator at his first Olympics, he thought he’d be seen as an underdog.
“Going in as a potential favourite for gold is not at all the position I expected to be in,” he says. Waking up at 4am to watch the Tokyo Games, he recalls thinking it was beyond him; now, it’s not even just about being at Paris. He wants to win.
“As a kid, it was like, the more pumped up I get, the easier it’s gonna be,” he says. “But when the last thing you do before you drop in is get this crazy, spiked heart rate , that’s not the best idea. You need to be calm.
” Now, the minute before dropping in, he reminds himself: “I’m doing it for me.” At the Olympics, he’s hoping to debut new tricks he’s been working on in secret for the past three years. “I want Paris to dwarf any other competition run I’ve done.
In an ideal world, I’d like to put down one perfect run, and then get my second minute on the course where I can leave it all on the floor, no stone unturned. That’s what I’m excited for,” he says. “Hopefully we’ll do another interview and I’ll have a nice bit of jewellery around my neck.
” – Xuanlin Tham Toby Roberts Age: 19 Hometown: Guildford, Surrey Key Event: Lead climbing In climbing, there’s a phrase, “morpho”, for routes whose difficulty is beyond your body size. “It’s when there’s a climb that’s too wide for you,” says Toby Roberts. “It’s a joke now, because when people can’t do something, they’ll just say it’s morpho.
” It’s not an excuse you sense Roberts uses very often. As a kid, he would push himself so hard running races that he’d throw up. When a teacher introduced him to climbing, he was hooked.
“It was the challenge: something you couldn’t do to start with, and then you put in work and you eventually get it,” he says. His first time in a proper climbing gym , Roberts threw himself into a competition and came last. “I remember being like, oh, my God, how are these people so much better than me? That’s when I got the bug.
” Fast-forward to 2024, and 19-year-old Roberts will make history as the first British male climber to compete at the Olympic Games. “I’ve watched the Olympics since I was a kid. I’m really psyched to go out there and give absolutely everything.
” Roberts landed his spot at the Games in October, beating reigning Olympic champ Alberto Ginés López at the IFSC boulder and indoor qualifiers only two months after hitting his “lowest moment”: missing out on the podium at the IFSC World Championship. “I went crazy. It was such a massive release of emotion,” he says.
Qualifying makes the painstaking, years-long journey towards Paris worth it. “If getting there was easy, it wouldn’t feel special.” The physical toll of competitive climbing isn’t to be underestimated.
Roberts’ fingertips are so raw he scalds himself holding a cup of tea. “And when you go to airports and they ask for your fingerprints – the amount of times I’ve stood there for 15 minutes, with them going, ‘Try again’,” he laughs. “Like I’m trying to break into the country.
” Roberts is at his best when he channels the intense pressure into his climbing ; he says he performs better during competitions than training. But he wears it lightly; even as he’s now not only representing Team GB but British climbing as a whole. “It’s such a unique sport – it’s amazing to see so many people trying it.
” – X.T..
