Skateboarding spent decades as a counterculture before it became an Olympic sport, and it still looks different from everything else at the Games. There is no finish line and no clock to beat. Five judges watch a skater ride a course for 45 seconds and score what they saw — the difficulty, the height, the style and whether they landed clean.

How Skateboarding Works

Olympic skateboarding has two disciplines, street and park, for men and women. Each is a different kind of contest, on a different kind of course, and the skills that win in one do not automatically transfer to the other.

Street is skateboarding as it happens on real streets. The course is built to look like an urban landscape: stairs, handrails, curbs, benches, walls and slopes. Skaters choose their own route around the course and use the obstacles to perform tricks. In each round, a skater performs two 45-second runs and five individually scored best-trick attempts.

Park is skateboarding in a bowl. The course is a hollowed-out concrete basin with steep curved walls, ramps and bumps. Skaters use the curves to build speed, climb the walls and launch into the air, linking tricks together in a flowing run. In each round, a skater performs three 45-second runs.

In both disciplines, the preliminary round has 20 skaters divided into heats, and the top eight scorers advance to the final.

The Tricks

Everything in skateboarding starts with the ollie, the trick that pops the board into the air without the skater touching it with their hands. From there, the vocabulary grows: flip tricks, where the board spins under the skater's feet; grinds, where the skater slides along a rail or ledge on the board's trucks; and aerials, where the skater grabs the board mid-air, sometimes by different parts of the deck, and lands back on the course.

Judges reward tricks that are difficult, high, fast, original and cleanly executed. Riding in switch stance — with the opposite foot forward from the skater's natural stance — increases the difficulty of everything. In park, height matters enormously: the higher a skater climbs out of the bowl, the more time they have to perform tricks in the air. In street, originality and the choice of line around the course count for just as much as raw difficulty.

Scoring

Five judges score each run or trick. The highest and lowest scores are dropped, and the remaining three are averaged. Judges consider the degree of difficulty, height, speed, originality, execution and the composition of the run — how the tricks flow together.

In street, runs and tricks are scored on a scale from 0 to 100. A skater's best run score and their two best single-trick scores are added together for a total round score. Falling on a best-trick attempt scores zero for that trick, and multiple falls in a run are judged accordingly.

In park, each run is scored from 0 to 100, and only the skater's best run counts towards the final ranking. If a skater falls during a run, that run ends. The result is a format where one perfect 45 seconds can win a medal.

Formats and Major Competitions

Skateboarding made its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020, with four events: men's and women's street, and men's and women's park. It has remained on the programme since, and the format has been refined at each Games.

Outside the Olympics, the biggest stages are the X Games and the professional street and park tours, where skaters compete in the same formats — runs and best tricks — that decide Olympic medals.

A Brief History

Skateboarding began in California in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when surfers wanted a way to practise on land when the waves were flat. They attached roller-skate wheels to wooden planks and called it "sidewalk surfing". The first commercially produced skateboards appeared in the 1950s, and by the early 1960s companies like Makaha were mass-producing boards with clay wheels.

The sport changed completely in the early 1970s, when polyurethane wheels arrived and gripped the pavement instead of skittering across it. Skaters could turn deeper and faster, and empty swimming pools left behind by the California drought became the first vertical skate spots. The ollie, the trick that defines modern skateboarding, was developed in the late 1970s. From street spots to skate parks to the Olympics, the sport took about seventy years to travel from a wooden plank with roller-skate wheels to a medal event.

How to Follow Skateboarding

Watch the park final first: three runs per skater, best run counts, and the height the skaters reach out of the bowl is genuinely startling. Then watch street, where the contest is slower and more tactical — the best skaters pick lines nobody else sees and land tricks on rails that look impossible. In both, the scoring is simple to follow once you know it: difficulty plus height plus clean landings, judged by five people watching the same run you are.