Looking back, the medallist says it certainly helped the skateboarding culture in Japan when some of these skateboarding venues were built by the government and credible organisations, giving a stamp of legitimacy to the sport and gradually removing the stigma of skateboarders being seen as delinquents. The Toyama skate park, for instance, was built by California Skateparks, one of the world’s most recognised skate park design and build companies, which also designs the courses for the X Games, a series of elite extreme sport events—BMX, skateboarding, skiing and snowboarding—in the US.

Elsewhere in Asia, China performed very well in skateboarding in the Asian Games in September 2023; most notably, skater Zhang Jie, who was 13 years old at the time, took gold in the men’s street finals, with teammate Su Jianjun winning bronze. “China has more than one billion people who they can select and train for any sport that person is suitable for,” says Stuart. The Chinese Extreme Sports Association and the China Roller Skating Association selected potential athletes from schools, community centres, sport leagues and even the Shaolin monasteries. Once the skateboarders are chosen, Stuart says they undergo a “very factory approach [of training for] 12 hours a day, seven days a week just to reach one goal: to win.

“Many critics say this is not real skateboarding [in terms of its culture, historical roots and communal spirit], but this is exactly the same way China dominates any sport like gymnastics or diving. China’s edge is that they have the people and resources, including the facilities to train the athletes full-time.” Skaters are obliged to commit to training for a minimum of four months each year at the camps, where there are dormitories, a dining hall, an indoor skate park, a fitness centre and a team of strength coaches, nutritionists, medics and psychologists.

Hong Kong is surprisingly well equipped. By 2017, it already had five large skate parks and eight smaller recreational parks. The first proper skateboard park in the city was completed in the early 2000s and the last park was completed in 2014. One of them is of Olympic standard and, according to Stuart, some Asian skateboard athletes who flew to this Hong Kong venue to train. But the skateboarding scene in Hong Kong just isn’t as big or historic as Europe and the US. “[This is] due to the size of a [city or] country. You have many more people skating and a lot of exposure to the top talents, especially in places like California, the birthplace of skateboarding, where there are very close ties to the roots of skateboarding and the surfing culture,” says Stuart.

He observes that Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Tokyo “can only emulate” the skateboarding culture from the west. “It’s very superficial; for example, in Japan, they will try to dress and act like their American counterparts, but they don’t have the same mindset and culture. If you go to Indonesia or Malaysia, they absorb US skateboarders’ fashion and their tricks, but because of their religion, they don’t drink, and there are many other things that they will not do,” he explains. “Coming back to Hong Kong, to anyone in their teenage years or 20s, skateboarding is about having a chill lifestyle and the freedom to do what you want. They absorb part of the skateboarding culture in the US, but that isn’t the essence of [its] culture.”

Hong Kong’s skateboarding scene, similar to the skate culture in big cities around the world, centres around skateboard shops set up by enthusiasts such as Stuart back in the 1990s. Since the Tokyo Olympics, there has also been an increase in demand to learn skateboarding; shopping malls, skateboard shops, and fashion and lifestyle brands have boosted the popularity of skateboarding via commercial campaigns.

Seeing an increased demand for skateboarding lessons in the city, many local professional skateboarders have switched to teaching the sport as a more profitable means of income, instead of just selling skateboard gear. “Seventy to 80 per cent of a skateboard shop’s income comes from teaching and coaching,” Stuart says. While this means better financial prospects, it also suggests talented skateboarders are teaching more than training. “This has led to a stagnation of skateboarding development in Hong Kong, because 90 per cent or more of skateboarding development is focusing on teaching beginners.”

The Sports Federation and Olympic Committee of Hong Kong, China is responsible for the Hong Kong delegation’s participation in international multisport games, such as the Olympics. But Stuart says that “even if we did decide to send athletes, none of our Hong Kong skateboard athletes meet the entry criteria for the Olympics,” which, according to the Olympics’ website, include being listed by name in the Olympic World Skateboarding Rankings as of June 24, 2024. Nearly “all of our skateboarders are well below the world ranking; the only one with a world ranking [Luk Chun Yi] is almost 37 years old. He came second last in the last Asian Games [in September 2023] in China.”

Female skateboarders in Asia might have a better chance; the Tokyo Olympics have made the sport, which is traditionally male-dominated, popular with and accessible to all genders. While the titans of the skateboarding world are men from North America, Europe and recently Japan, Stuart observes that the gap in the standards and performance between female contenders in Asia and the world’s top countries isn’t that wide. “There were far fewer female skateboarders ten, 20 years ago than there are today. It’s easier for Asian female skaters to chase [the standard of western female skaters]. A good example is Japan, and possibly China, whose female skateboarders have managed to catch up to their western counterparts,” he says.

For men, in general, since the west has a much longer history and generations of infrastructure from in the late 1970s and 1980s, the skill level is very high. “None of this existed in Asia; it’s only until the last decade or so that Asia started to catch up,” says Stuart. “For many countries’ sport associations, for example, in China or even nearby in the Philippines, if we use the male standard of skateboarding as a bar, the gap between male Asian skateboarders and [top global] male skateboarders is too big.”

Back in Japan, Nakayama is working on perfecting her signature tricks—backside boardslides on rails and noseslides, at which she excelled at the Tokyo Olympics— and practising new tricks which she claims “no one has done before. People around me always tell me to do less risky tricks because they’re worried about my safety,” she says. Her determination is shown by how unfazed she is by injuries; the most recent serious one being a fracture to her collarbone last May at the international skateboard event Uprising Tokyo. “But I want to do things my own way. I like big and powerful moves. I don’t care what people say about me.”

And she has high hopes for the sport that she loves. “The top competitions are in Brazil and the US. I want to see more international competitions in Japan and beyond. I want to see more people coming to Japan to see our athletes compete.” For now, retirement is a very long way off for the teenager. But she says that when the time comes for her to step down as a national contender, she’d like to “use my skateboarding experience to do something meaningful that’s still related to skateboarding in the future. After all, all my life is about skateboarding.”

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