Olympic Skateboarding Course Announcement!

Leticia Bufoni held the #1 rank in Women’s Street Skateboarder by World Cup Skate for four years (2010 - 2013) and appeared in the Guinness Book of World Records for  “Most Wins in World Cup Skateboarding.”   ©Kenji Haruta

Five time X Games Gold Medallist and SLS Super Crown champion Leticia Bufoni will be representing her home country Brazil in the upcoming Olympic Games Tokyo 2020.

Left: Park course & Right: Street course. *Course design may be subject to change ©California Skateparks

Press Release via World Skate: The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Tokyo 2020) today unveiled the designs of the courses for skateboarding events, which will be featured at the Tokyo 2020 Games for the first time in Olympic history. Construction of the courses, which will be located in Ariake Urban Sports Park in the stunning waterfront area close to the Olympic Village, will be completed in early May.

There will be two types of skateboarding event at the Tokyo 2020 Games: "Street", in which skateboarders compete on a course that resembles a city street, and "Park", in which they compete on a hollowed-out course featuring a series of complicated curves. The judges will evaluate the difficulty, height and speed of the tricks, including jumps and body rotations, performed by the skateboarders while in mid-air.

Park course. *Course design may be subject to change ©California Skateparks

The Tokyo 2020 skateboarding courses are a culmination of the designs and experiences derived from a number of world championships. Each course will be about 1.5 - to 2 times the size of a standard competition course, allowing full use during each athlete's time on standby. Both the "Street" and "Park" courses have been designed with equality in mind, supporting a smooth skate for competitors of any stance (regular or goofy) and any gender.

The design of the Tokyo 2020 skateboarding courses was overseen by Mr. Joe Ciaglia and the construction by Mr. Bill Minadeo.

Mr. Ciaglia commented, “The design for the Skateboarding Street and Park Courses at the Tokyo 2020 Games is intended to far exceed anything that has ever been built for professional skateboarding competition. Each of the custom concrete courses was meticulously designed to give skateboard athletes the ability to maximize their own creativity, flow, speed, amplitude, technicality, and variety. The layout of the skate features is also driven by the Olympic competition format and the goal of providing skateboard athletes from all over the world the terrain necessary to achieve their own personal best and to help advance skateboarding into the future.”

Tokyo 2020 Games Skateboarding Competition Schedule

・ Sunday 25 and Monday 26 July 2021 - Street (men’s, women’s)

・ Wednesday 4 and Thursday 5 August 2021 - Park (men’s, women’s)

Street course. *Course design may be subject to change ©California Skateparks

NISHIKAWA Takashi - director of Tokyo 2020 Japan Skateboarding Team

Park course: The course is one size larger and more complicated than the existing international competitions. Air at a height of 2.95m in the deep zone is one of the highlights of the contest. There is also no doubt that the compound sections (round and volcano) located in the course centre will increase the difficulty of the course and will have a significant impact on the skateboard's scoring in terms of difficulty, height, speed and style depending on how it is used. Particularly, how to use a particularly large volcano? Use it as a hip or jump over it? It's a section that will excite both the skaters and the spectators on how to use it. It is possible to show unique tricks with the section with round rails on the flat bank and the square rails on the rounded part. Since the course is particularly wide, such as the various hip sections (where the banks overlap diagonally), the key point is to increase the difficulty and slide through the complex sections at high speed.

Street course: Compared to existing domestic and international contests, the point is how to leverage the sections arranged symmetrically on the left and right, with tall rails, long rails, and ledges with different lengths and heights. There is plenty of flat space when entering the section, and the course is designed to be very easy to start skating. In the first half run of the contest, the point is how fast the skateboarder can slide through the entire section and put in a lot of tricks. The main section in the centre also has tall square rails, round rails, rails from the pop-out bank, etc., and in the best tricks in the latter half of the contest, how to make difficult tricks here will be a key point.