NARRATOR: In recent history, skateboarding
has become a pop culture phenomenon.
You see it in everything, from TV advertisements
to fashion shows.
And for the first time ever, skateboarding
will be introduced in the 2020 Summer Olympics.
But, skateboarding hasn't always had
the mass appeal you see today.
Sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s,
skateboarding was born out of the boredom of surfers
when the waves were no good.
They would remove the wheels from roller skates
and attach them to pieces of wood to create a skateboard.
By the 1960s, skateboarding's popularity
had grown with the rise of surf culture.
Contests were held all over, and the first sponsored
skateboarders were beginning to emerge.
However, the popularity of skating in the '60s
dropped just as fast as it rose.
The 1970s brought along one of the most important changes
for the skateboarding world, the advent of the urethane
wheel, which allowed skaters to ride
faster and over rougher types of ground than ever before.
In 1976, a horrible drought in Southern California
forced most homeowners with backyard swimming pools
to drain them, giving way to the birthplace of pool skating.
This was the first major shift in how
people rode their skateboards.
No longer were they limited to the abysmal, flat grounds
of parking lots and sidewalks.
The 1980s were a time of renaissance in skateboarding.
People were constantly inventing new tricks,
pros were earning unheard of amounts of money,
and skateboarder-owned companies were thriving.
The favorable terrain for most of this era was vert.
And even though there was a high level of progression occurring,
to the untrained eye, skateboarding
had gone stale and the popularity
once again fell flat.
This lull in skateboarding led to the introduction
of street skating, which brings us into the 1990s.
Skating during this era was at its most raw.
Skaters took to the streets to find new terrain,
abandoning traditional skate parks
for something that felt more natural
and could be done anywhere, by anyone.
This meant skating things that occur almost anywhere,
like sets of stairs, handrails, benches, curbs, and just about
anywhere four wheels can roll.
From there, skateboarding has been on a nonstop, uphill climb
to what it is today.
At its core, skateboarding has traditionally
been for the underdogs, the outcasts, the misfits,
and in result has been thought of negatively
by a large majority of outsiders for most of its existence.
But now, with generations of young adults
who grew up with skateboarding and the exposure
at an all-time high, the future of skateboarding
is looking bright.