this year was the first year that i watched the olympics in HD. it was a truly awesome experience with slow motion replays and all, and it temporarily re-heightened my fascination with specialized athletics. then i started thinking… where was skateboarding? skateboarding is a super-difficult, astonishingly-dangerous, yet beautiful-to-watch sport. maybe it is wrapped in a shroud of its relative newness or the ‘X-treme’ culture it is often tagged with, but seriously. a skateboard is just another device for a technical and coordinated routine as figure skates are.

youtube searching brought me back to my adolescent amazement of rodney mullen. genius flatland skateboarder, and inventor of dozens of tricks, rodney is my all-time favorite. check out this video of rodney in 1984 japan. watch the way he feels so comfortable with the board that he can do anything with it. that level of control requires a very high level of a specific type of athleticism. now if only i could watch an international competition of it in slow-motion HD. maybe next time…