Since the dawn of time, a skateboard has been a plank of wood connected to wheels with metal. But how far can technology take it until it isn’t real skateboarding anymore?
Viewer of the channel Jurgen asks a question – how far is technology allowed to go so that a skateboard is still considered a skateboard? Let’s look at four theoretical skateboard inventions to see where the line is.
Spring Ollie Support
First, spring-powered ollies. Is this even possible? Let’s take a quick look at Avenue Trucks. These are basically one big spring, used to absorb impact, like suspension. But on their website, they make this claim:
“We are the ONLY skate truck that helps add pop! Our baseplates compress slightly before every ollie. Once you pop, that pre-loaded compression is immediately released and force is expelled upwards into the deck!”
Let’s take this claim at face value and assume it’s true. I doubt that the amount of extra pop you get is very much with Avenue specifically, but let’s take this to a logical conclusion and imagine a truck with extra springs, maybe even mechanized to release when it detects a pop with a sensor.
Is it still skateboarding if you can ollie a foot higher every time?
It kind of depends on whether skateboarding has rules. It’s almost like bringing a small kicker everywhere. There’s nothing wrong with skating a higher ledge than you normally could with a kicker, but it wouldn’t really fly in a street part, unless it’s unskateable otherwise. If you’re using the springs to just attain normal height without much effort, most skaters would probably consider that cheating. Although, it would feel pretty awesome.
Drive
Next up, what about motorized wheels? Longboards with motors exist, but let’s imagine that the drive is in the wheels, and there isn’t a battery pack that stops you from doing slides. And they can detect which direction you’re going, so you can still do a pop shove it without slamming.
In one way, this isn’t cheating at all. If you see someone get towed into a trick by a bike or car, it’s probably about to be cool because it’s so big that you need that kind of speed. Nobody really cares if you were able to get that speed with just pushing. Would this be the same?
Imagine a long, high speed line with no pushing. That would be pretty cool. Just trick after trick. The skater does a grind, slows down in it, then lands and automatically speeds back up. In that case, I wouldn’t mind.
On the other hand, the way that I would use these would definitely be cheating.
Instead of setting them to be fast, what if they were set to be pretty slow? You could land a backside flip badly, toe touch, and still roll away at the same speed you started at. It would ‘pass’ as legit a lot easier.
Or, you could do a really long grind, slide until you were completely out of speed, then land and roll away with some speed, which you wouldn’t have otherwise. In my mind, this one is a bit too far. It would get abused too much by lazy, old skaters like me.
Truck Rollers
This one is going to take a little imagination. Have you seen people skating ledges stationary? Thetrampskateguy comes to mind. He’s usually skating on trampolines, but he also does some stationary grinds on flat.
Imagine if the trucks and baseplates had mini treadmill type rollers in them. You could ollie into a grind, lock in, and it could drive you forward. This would be a powered step up from Z Rollers, an 80s product that let the top of the truck spin freely to give you way more grind distance.
This one, I think unanimously, would be considered cheating. Even if it’s just a boost – a long grind gets longer. Or even a grind gets slowed down. Think of Andy Anderson’s anti wax for that handrail kink. He couldn’t come into the kink that fast, so he had to make something that would slow him down. Using that to just barely grind slow enough to make it would be one thing. But if you could just grind at whatever speed you’re comfortable with all the time, that would almost always be cheating. Luckily this one is more on the sci-fi side of things. With the different angles your trucks slide at, it’s not really possible to always be going forward, no matter whether it’s a smith or a crooked grind.
We’ve got one more, but first I’d like to thank Jurgen again for his question. If you have one of your own, submit it at radratvideo.com, where there are also T-Shirts. If you’re an XL or XXL, I’m really overstocked on those, so go pick one up for ten bucks!
Gyroscopic Flip Support
The last one could theoretically be possible, but you might never be able to do a boardslide again.
Imagine a triple axis gyroscope on the bottom of your board. It can track how fast your board is rotating on different axes, maybe paired with a sensor to see how far you are from the ground. What if you were about to land primo on a kickflip, and the gyro spins up and kicks the board that extra few degrees to make sure you land safe.
Or hey, want to land primo on purpose? You can do that too. Johnny Giger can take all the effort out of his impossible tricks of Rodney Mullen series.
This would have a lot of uses. You throw a tre flip, and it’s under-rotated and over-flipped. No big deal. The gyroscope fixes it and you land clean. Then it resets when you land.
Your kickflip is a little rocketed? No big deal there either, the gyroscope dips the nose down and levels it out. Or even nosedives it a little. Add steeze with an app on your phone.
But it wouldn’t have to be so obvious though. What if you ollied some stairs, and you were about to land just a little bit crooked? The board can straighten itself out so you can land with speed.
This one, of course, would also be cheating. But it could be useful as a training device. Learn kickflips with the assistance turned on high, then turn it on medium, and the low, and then off. Now you’ve learned kickflips in smaller bite-sized chunks instead of all at once. Repeat with every other trick. You wouldn’t ever film with it, but it wouldn’t be a terrible idea.
What do you think? What skateboard inventions can you come up with that would cross the line into cheating, or make it not even count as skateboarding anymore? Let me know in the comments.