Skateboarding's Olympic Debut: A Comparative Analysis Describing the Men's and Women's Street Competition
Date
Authors
Diewald, Shelley N
Mancini, Nick
Noth, Niklas
Neville, Jonathon
Cronin, John B
Cross, Matt R
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
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Publisher
SAGE Publications
Abstract
The aim of this study was to describe aspects of performance in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic street skateboarding competition and compare the men's (M) and women's (W) divisions. Trick attempts (TA = 1118) were extracted from broadcast footage of the semi-finals and finals using notational analysis. Descriptive analyses were adopted to characterise performance, with robust linear mixed-effects models comparing attempt scores (run [RUN] and best-trick [BT]) between divisions. Men's RUN (β = 1.71 [1.43, 1.99]) and BT (β = 1.85 [1.55, 2.15]) scores were higher and more variable than the women. Overall, there was more trick variety during BTs, but less obstacle variability compared to RUNs. Skaters bailed a greater proportion of BT TAs (54.6%) than RUN TAs (14.3%). Men demonstrated greater variety than women by diversifying take-off (M = 28.2% vs. W = 3.3% non-regular) and landing (M = 25.7% vs. W = 6.2% non-regular) stances, attempting more unique tricks (M = 122 vs. W = 74), and using larger feature obstacles (M = 40.7% vs. W = 33.9% of TAs). Alternatively, women demonstrated wider course use during BTs (M = 15% vs. W = 32.1% of all obstacles), corresponding to less feature obstacle use; perhaps indicating a barrier to engagement due to developing physical qualities. Future research should explore men's and women's divisions respectively to understand key factors for success.Description
Keywords
11 Medical and Health Sciences, 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, 32 Biomedical and clinical sciences, 42 Health sciences, 52 Psychology, Action sport, freestyle, obstacles, take-off stance, trick classification
Source
International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, ISSN: 1747-9541 (Print); 2048-397X (Online), SAGE Publications. doi: 10.1177/17479541261420351
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© The Author(s) 2026. Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).