Skateboarding 101

1. Skateboarding in short

A skateboard is a wooden deck on four wheels, and almost nothing else. No engine, no bindings, no written rules. That’s exactly what makes it hard to learn and impossible to exhaust: everything you land opens onto something you can’t do yet.

It’s also been an Olympic sport since the Tokyo Games, held in 2021 — which changed its visibility far more than its practice. In a municipal park on a Saturday morning, none of that shows: there are only people missing the same trick until it lands.

2. Where it comes from

Skateboarding was born in California as a fallback: surfers looking for something to do when the ocean went flat. The first boards were improvised, on metal or clay wheels that gripped badly and stopped on the smallest pebble.

The real trigger came in the early 1970s with the urethane wheel. It gripped, it absorbed, it rolled over imperfect asphalt — and suddenly the sport was possible somewhere other than a smooth floor. This was when, during a drought, skaters emptied swimming pools to ride their curved walls. Today’s skatepark bowl comes straight from that.

Then came the ollie. In the late 1970s, Alan Gelfand got airborne with no hands on a ramp. A few years later, Rodney Mullen moved the motion onto flat ground — and that changed everything. Jumping without a ramp and without grabbing anything made all street furniture rideable: curbs, benches, handrails. Skateboarding left the park and took the street.

3. Street, park, bowl: how it’s ridden

4. The gear, piece by piece

A complete board comes assembled, and that’s the right place to start: you learn what you like before picking parts. Here’s what each piece does, so that the day you replace something, you know why.

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5. The tricktionary

Six tricks to learn the vocabulary. Each panel animates from the angle where the trick reads best — side, rear or top view, noted under each one.

6. Where to skate in Quebec

Plein Air Québec lists 345 skateparks, from Montreal to Nord-du-Québec. Each listing gives the location, description and photos.

See every skatepark on the map →

7. Your first ten sessions

1. 1

   Learn to push and to stop before anything else. Front foot stays on the board, back foot pushes, then lands. Dragging the back foot on the ground is enough braking at first.

2. 2

   Find your stance: left foot forward (regular) or right foot forward (goofy). Neither is better, and you don’t really choose it — you discover it.

3. 3

   Work the ollie standing still, on grass or a mat, where the board can’t shoot out. The motion comes before speed.

4. 4

   Learn to fall: knees bent, roll over the shoulder rather than reaching out. Straight wrists take impact badly.

5. 5

   Go to the park at quiet hours when starting out. On a weekday morning you’ll have room to fail in peace.

6. 6

   Watch where others are riding before dropping in. A skatepark has lines of travel, and cutting them is the one real breach of etiquette.

One last thing, and it’s the most useful: nobody learns skateboarding quickly. The curve is hundreds of failed attempts for one landed, and it’s the same for everyone at the park — including the ones who look like they know.