Disciplines
While there are many ways to ride a skateboard, from mere transport to extreme pursuits like mega ramp, a few are etched in skateboarding culture as popular formats. Skateboard New Zealand’s focus is to support and promote skateboarding that the people of Aotearoa, New Zealand and the world want to do. Our current funding model prioritises Olympic disciplines, in just so happens that they are also the favourite pastimes of most New Zealanders that skateboard.
Olympic disciplines
Currently, there are two Olympic skateboarding disciplines — Park and Street.
Street
Born directly from the sidewalks, plazas, and schoolyards of the 1980s and 90s, Street skateboarding is the sport’s most accessible discipline. While most street skateboarders still cut their teeth and shape their style on real urban architecture, Olympic-style courses mimic this environment using stair sets, handrails, gaps, ledges, and benches. Skateboarders link together highly technical combinations of grinds, slides, and flip tricks in fluid motion.
During competitions, riders follow the Olympic 2/3/2 format, performing two 45-second runs followed by three individual best-trick attempts. Each attempt is judged on a scale of 0–10, with the top two scores from all five attempts combined for the final overall score.
Park
The Park discipline blends several legacy transition-style formats, including vertical ramps, deep concrete bowls, and backyard pools. The course is a large, interconnected flowing area made up of transitional walls, hips, spines, and banks, often topped with rail and ledge features. This unique layout allows skateboarders to generate massive momentum, carving the park to perform a seamless sequence of high-flying aerials and lip tricks without ever pushing.
During competitions, skateboarders are given up to four 45-second runs to showcase their speed, style, and creative use of the entire bowl layout. Each run is judged on a scale of 0–100, and only the single highest-scoring run counts as their final score.
Other disciplines
Downhill
Downhill skateboarding has its origins in the 1970s surge of popularity in the activity or sport. It has developed as a discipline in its own right with a passionate following of speed seekers across the globe. Downhill skateboarders use specialist equipment such as longer boards, purpose-built trucks and larger, softer wheels to maintain stability, slide and turn while travelling down hills at very high speeds. Protective gear akin to that of a motorcycle racer’s is common attire.
Pool
Pool skateboarding originated in the Western United States in the 1970s when droughts resulted in backyard pools being left empty. The style of backyard pools with curved surfaces and edges was particularly enticing to the surfers and skateboarders of places like California. As a result, pool skateboarding took off and is still alive and well today. It directly informed the development of the first skateparks and other disciplines such as Vert and Bowl and Park more recently.
Bowl
Simply put, skatepark bowls are more accessible backyard pools. Bowls come in all shapes and sizes, big and small. They range from replications of backyard pools to more open and flowing bowls, similar to what you see in the Olympic Park format.
Vertical
Vertical skateboarding traditionally takes place on purpose-built halfpipes with large radius transitions and 30 cms or more vertical at the top. Like the skating seen in Park and Bowl formats, skaters will do a series of aerial and lip tricks in one run. Due to the design of the halfpipes and their plywood or Skatelite surfaces, this skating format is a place where more height and trick innovation takes place, bringing elements of bowl and street skating together. New Zealand skateboarders have seen the most success in this format in the 1980s and early 1990s. Dave Crabb, Lee Ralph, Andrew Morrison and Gregor Rakine are a few who have become well known professionally, competitively and culturally.
Adaptive
Several adaptative skateboarders have been active in skateboarding over the last few decades, often competing alongside their peers in regular formats. The popularity of adaptive skateboarding has seen a surge in recent years, and there are global campaigns in place to have Adaptive skateboarding included in the 2028 Paralympics. Watch this space.
Since its inception, many forms of skateboarding have held a place in the hearts and minds of skateboarders. Disciplines such as Freestyle, Slalom and Skatercross are but a few of them. Skateboarders are creative and innovative, so we’ll never rule anything out.