Surfing was a Polynesian tradition long before it was an Olympic sport, and skateboarding grew up on the days California surfers had no waves. These thirty-six stories run from Mark Twain's failed try at surf-bathing to Olympic podiums in Tokyo and Tahiti, by way of three princes on redwood boards, a country that outlawed skateboards for 11 years, a trick named for a Florida kid and a lifeguard who paddled for help.
Every tile in a Surfing and Skateboarding game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Surfing
nine stories
1Mark Twain tries surfing and loses the board
On the tile: Mark Twain1866
In 1866 the Sacramento Union sent a young Mark Twain to report from the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii. In Roughing It, published in 1872, he described Hawaiians paddling three or four hundred yards out with short boards, then riding a wave in and "whizzing by like a bombshell." He tried surf-bathing himself. "I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself." The board reached the beach without him, and he hit the bottom with, as he put it, a couple of barrels of water in him.
2Three Hawaiian princes ride the waves at Santa Cruz
On the tile: Surf Princes1885
In July 1885 three young Hawaiian princes, David Kawananakoa, Edward Keliiahonui and Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, paddled out at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz, California, on long boards milled from local redwood. The local paper, the Surf, reported "surf-board swimming as practiced in their native islands." Five years later, Kuhio and David surfed the North Sea at Bridlington, England. "We enjoy surf riding very much and surprise the people to see us riding on the surf," Kuhio wrote to the Hawaiian consul.
3Duke Kahanamoku shows Sydney how to shoot the breakers
On the tile: Freshwater1914
Duke Kahanamoku came to Australia as an Olympic swimming champion, but his most lasting show was on a board. On December 22, 1914, the Sydney Morning Herald announced that he would give "an exhibition of breaker-shooting and board shooting" at Freshwater Beach. The display, held just before Christmas, is credited with introducing board surfing to Australia. His manager remarked that in a swimming tank, Duke was "just like a bird in a cage." The board he rode that day is kept by the Freshwater surf club.
4The first world surfing titles and two surprising champions
On the tile: Manly 19641964
Manly Beach in Sydney hosted the first world surfing championships in 1964, and both winners took unusual routes there. Phyllis O'Donnell did not start surfing until she was 23. Four years later she won Australia's national title, then beat American champion Linda Benson for the women's world crown. Bernard Farrelly won the men's event. He got his nickname, "Midget," as a six-year-old standing next to a 17-foot hollow paddleboard, and after an earlier big win he dyed his bleached hair black to avoid attention.
5Peru's little reed horses and a claim to surfing's roots
On the tile: HuanchacoAncientLegend
The story goes that some of the world's first wave riders were Peruvian fishermen. In Huanchaco, on Peru's northern coast, fishermen still ride caballitos de totora, "little reed horses," through the surf. Use of totora reed dates to the Mochica and Chimu cultures, and Peru has declared it part of the national cultural heritage. Save The Waves, which made Huanchaco a World Surfing Reserve, says wave riding there reaches back more than 2,500 years. Whether a reed fishing craft counts as surfing is still debated.
6California makes surfing its official state sport
On the tile: California2018
On August 20, 2018, California's governor approved Assembly Bill 1782, and surfing became the official state sport, alongside emblems such as the golden poppy and the redwood. The law is more than a salute to Malibu and Mavericks. Its text says surfing traces its origins to the Polynesian people and came to California from Hawaii, and it gives Indigenous names for famous breaks, such as Humaliwu, the Chumash name for Malibu. It also claims the world's first neoprene wetsuit for the San Francisco Bay Area.
7Duke's dream comes true at surfing's Olympic debut
On the tile: Carissa Moore2021
Surfing reached the Olympics at the Tokyo Games, held in 2021 on a beach about 40 miles from Tokyo. On July 27, Honolulu's Carissa Moore won the first women's gold medal, and Brazil's Italo Ferreira won the men's. Moore was the only surfer of Native Hawaiian descent in the competition, and she wore a plumeria hair clip her mother had given her. Duke Kahanamoku had urged Olympic officials to add surfing generations earlier. "This was his dream to have surfing in the Olympics," Moore said.
8An Olympic event held 9,800 miles from its host city
On the tile: Teahupo'o2024
Paris hosted the 2024 Olympics, but the surfers competed at Teahupo'o, a reef break in Tahiti, French Polynesia. Organizers picked it over Biarritz, Lacanau, Les Landes and La Torche on mainland France, and the IOC approved the site in 2020. Tahiti lies about 9,800 miles from Paris, far enough to set an odd record. The previous farthest Olympic medal event from its host city was the 1956 equestrian competition, moved from Melbourne to Stockholm, some 9,700 miles away, because of quarantine laws.
Kathy Kohner began surfing at Malibu in 1956, a small-framed girl among regulars such as Miki Dora. One of them, Terry "Tubesteak" Tracy, blended "girl" and "midget" into her nickname: Gidget. She came home gushing about the waves, and her father, Frederick Kohner, wrote her story into his first novel, Gidget, which sold half a million copies. The 1959 film starring Sandra Dee helped spark a surf boom, with surfer Mickey Munoz doubling for Dee in a blond wig and bikini. Kathy herself quit surfing for college.
Skateboarding started as surfing's understudy. In the early 1960s a Southern California lifeguard named Larry Stevenson noticed that on days when the waves were tame, surfers darted around a parking lot on crude boards made of wooden planks and metal roller-skate wheels. Californians called it sidewalk surfing, and the craze moved fast enough that in 1964 Surfer Publications launched a companion magazine, The Quarterly Skateboarder. It moved fast in the other direction too: the magazine folded after four issues, the last in December 1965.
2Skateboarding's national championships reach network TV
On the tile: Anaheim 19651965
On May 22 and 23, 1965, skaters filled La Palma Stadium in Anaheim, California, for the national skateboarding championships. The program sounds gentle today: the women's titles were decided in tricks, a figure eight and a flatland slalom. What made the weekend matter was the camera. ABC's Wide World of Sports carried the contest, the first skateboarding competition ever shown on national television.
3A skateboard film with no dialogue wins at Cannes
On the tile: Skaterdater1965
In 1965 a film crew followed seven boys from the Imperial Skateboard Club in Torrance, California, shooting around Torrance, Redondo Beach, Palos Verdes Estates and San Pedro. The result, Skaterdater, was an 18-minute boy-meets-girl story with no dialogue at all, building to a skate-off down a hilly street. It won the Palme d'Or for best short film at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award, losing to Claude Berri's The Chicken.
Kona Skatepark opened in Jacksonville, Florida, on June 4, 1977, in the middle of the concrete skatepark boom. Within two years it was bankrupt. In 1979 the Ramos family, with support from the community, reopened it and dedicated it to the youth of Jacksonville. Kona is still running, snake run and all, and the Skateboarding Hall of Fame calls it the longest running commercial skatepark still open. It also appears as a level in the video game Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.
Thrasher magazine arrived in January 1981, during one of skateboarding's lowest downturns. Its editor, Kevin Thatcher, drew the first cover by hand: a skater blasting across concrete coping. Its rallying cry, Skate and Destroy, suited hard times. The sport's established magazine had by then become SkateBoarder's Action Now, and it printed its last issue in February 1982. Thrasher kept going for more than four decades, and its Skater of the Year award became one of the most coveted honors in skateboarding.
6The videotape that changed how skateboards were sold
On the tile: Bones Brigade1984
In 1984 the Powell-Peralta company released The Bones Brigade Video Show, filmed by Stacy Peralta, one of the top pro skaters of the 1970s. The Skateboarding Hall of Fame calls it the first skateboarding video, and it changed the way skateboard companies marketed their products. By 1987 the Bones Brigade team included Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain, Tommy Guerrero and Rodney Mullen. Peralta went on to direct documentaries, among them Dogtown and Z-Boys and Riding Giants.
7The country where skateboarding was against the law
On the tile: Norway Ban1978-1989
In 1978 Norway banned skateboards outright. It became illegal to import, sell or advertise skateboards or their parts, or to ride one, after a product safety council warned that experience in other countries showed uncontrolled skateboarding caused many accidents, some serious. Police chased skaters and confiscated boards. Skaters smuggled boards in from abroad, splitting the parts among several people's luggage, and built an illegal ramp in the woods in Oslo. The ban was lifted in May 1989, and that summer skating exploded across the country.
8The London concrete that skaters refused to give up
On the tile: Southbank2014
Skaters have ridden the undercroft beneath London's Queen Elizabeth Hall since the early 1970s. In March 2013 the Southbank Centre proposed a 120-million-pound redevelopment of its Festival Wing that would turn the spot into restaurants and coffee shops and move the skaters to a purpose-built park under Hungerford Bridge. They refused, formed Long Live Southbank and gathered more than 150,000 signatures. The application was withdrawn, and on September 18, 2014, the two sides signed a binding agreement with Lambeth council that keeps the undercroft open.
An Australian skater from Melbourne, Oliver Percovich, began teaching children to skateboard in Kabul's streets in 2007. It grew into Skateistan, a school where skate sessions come with classroom lessons and close to half the students are girls; it now runs schools in Cambodia and South Africa too. In 2020 a documentary about its Kabul students, Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl), won the Academy Award for best documentary short. Its director, Carol Dysinger, said the film had to be made by an all-female crew.
In 1911, at the first AAU meet held in Hawaii, Duke Kahanamoku swam 100 yards in 55.4 seconds in Honolulu Harbor, a world record. Officials on the mainland questioned whether the time could be real. So he traveled to the mainland, swam in a pool for the first time, and won the 100-meter freestyle at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. He won it again in 1920 and took silver in 1924, behind Johnny Weissmuller. At 41 he was an alternate on the 1932 U.S. water polo team.
In 1968 Eddie Aikau became the first lifeguard the City and County of Honolulu hired to work on Oahu's North Shore. He was posted at Waimea Bay, where he was known for riding the giant surf, and not one life was lost while he guarded it. In March 1978 he sailed on the voyaging canoe Hokule'a, which capsized in stormy seas about 12 miles south of Molokai. Aikau set off on his surfboard toward Lanai to get help. The crew was rescued, but he was never seen again.
Linda Benson learned to surf at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, California, by waiting for her brother or his friends to lose a board and paddling it back out to them. At 13 she bought her own, a beat-up board that cost $20. In 1959, at 15, she was the youngest contestant ever to enter the International Championship at Makaha, and she won. That same year she became the first woman to ride Waimea Bay, on a board borrowed from the shortest man surfing with her.
4The teenage world champion who walked away and came back
On the tile: Margo Oberg1968-1981
Margo Godfrey won a world contest in Puerto Rico in 1968 as a teenager, riding a 9-foot board. Then, in step with the anti-contest mood of the late 1960s, she stopped competing and surfed for fun. When professional contests began in 1975, she came back, and the Surfing Walk of Fame calls her the first pro woman surfer. She took the women's world title in 1977, then back-to-back crowns in 1980 and 1981, by then as Margo Oberg. She went on to teach surfing on Kauai.
Layne Beachley started surfing at age 4 in Sydney but was not truly hooked until 16, and she had no amateur record to speak of when she turned pro in 1989. Then she won six consecutive world titles on the ASP tour, from 1998 through 2003, a feat the Surfing Walk of Fame calls unsurpassed, and added a seventh in 2006. She finished her career with 28 tour victories, the most by a woman at the time. She also rode big waves, towing into the North Shore break called Phantoms in 1997.
Greg Noll grew up beside the Manhattan Beach pier in California, fishing and handing live bait to the fishermen before he ever rode a wave. A bodybuilder's build and a hard-charging style earned him the nickname "Da Bull," and his black-and-white prison-stripe trunks made him easy to spot in the water. In 1957 he was among the first group to surf Waimea Bay. In December 1969, at 32, he dropped into a Makaha giant that witnesses called the biggest wave yet ridden, though later estimates of its height vary widely.
7The Pipeline pioneer who got a skateboard of his own
On the tile: Phil EdwardsEarly 1960s
Phil Edwards came to surfing through model boats. His half-brother built him a paddleboard so he could chase them around Los Alamitos Bay. Edwards went on to help create the smooth, knee-dropping style known as classic California surfing, and he is largely credited as the first person to ride Pipeline on Oahu's North Shore, in the early 1960s. Skateboarding claimed him too. When Makaha began producing professional skateboards in 1963, one of the first professional models was made for Edwards.
Patti McGee's first skateboard was a family project. "He had swiped the wheels off my rink skates to make it," she said of the board her brother Jack built in wood shop. In 1965, at 19, she turned pro with the Hobie team for $250 a month plus travel expenses, touring the country to give demonstrations. That same year she was on the cover of Life magazine. On television, she taught Johnny Carson to skate on The Tonight Show. In 2010 she became the first woman inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame.
At the 1975 Del Mar Nationals, the Zephyr skate team, the Z-Boys, showed off a low, aggressive, surf-inspired style that changed the sport. The team's one woman was Peggy Oki, who said she hardly noticed being the only girl. Her teammates included Jay Adams and Tony Alva, yet Oki was the only Zephyr skater to take home a first-place trophy from that contest. She always said she skated just for fun. She later became an artist, a biologist and an environmental activist.
Tom Blake was born in Milwaukee in 1902. At 18 he met Duke Kahanamoku, and inspired, he rode a freight train to Los Angeles and took up swimming and surfing. To make boards lighter, he drilled hundreds of holes in a redwood board in 1926, then built hollow boards braced with wooden ribs like an airplane wing. In 1932 he used one to rescue two sailors, and lifesaving groups adopted his hollow paddleboards. In 1935 he added a fin, his most lasting gift to board design.
Hobie Alter began shaping balsa-wood surfboards in his father's garage in 1950. By 1958 he and laminator Gordon "Grubby" Clark had made boards from polyurethane foam blanks, and Alter threw out his balsa equipment. In 1961 Clark founded Clark Foam, which became the largest foam-blank maker in the world. Then, on Monday, December 5, 2005, word came that Clark Foam was shutting down, effective immediately. The surfboard industry panicked, and leftover Clark blanks became prized among shapers.
Surf lore often credits Jack O'Neill with inventing the wetsuit. The neoprene wetsuit is actually credited to Hugh Bradner, a University of California physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. In 1951, thinking about Navy frogmen, he worked out that a diver did not have to stay dry to stay warm: water trapped under neoprene would warm to body temperature. He never patented it. O'Neill and Body Glove made the first surfing wetsuits, but surf historian Matt Warshaw put it plainly: "Bradner was the father of the wetsuit."
In 1952 Jack O'Neill opened what he called the Surf Shop in a garage beside San Francisco's Ocean Beach, though his friends warned he would sell to five friends on the beach and then be out of business. His wetsuits kept cold-water surfers in the water longer. In the early 1970s his son Pat developed a surf leash, and Jack lost an eye while testing it. True to form, he made the eye patch a symbol of his company, and his bearded, patched face became known around the world as a logo.
Tom Morey was a jazz drummer and surfer with a mathematics degree from USC, and he had worked with composite materials for the aircraft makers Boeing and Douglas. In 1965 he staged the Tom Morey Invitational noseriding contest in Ventura, California, credited as the first professional surfing contest. In July 1971 he came up with the invention he is remembered for, a bodyboard he named the Morey Boogie, inspired by his love of jazz. It went on to carry millions of ocean lovers into the waves.
Early skateboards rolled on metal roller-skate wheels, then on hard clay wheels. Frank Nasworthy, a surfer, found that urethane wheels made for roller skates worked just as well on his Hobie skateboard, and in 1973 he introduced Cadillac Wheels, urethane wheels made for skateboards. The extra traction let riders carve low like surfers, then move up banks and into empty swimming pools. In 1974 Road Rider wheels added precision ball bearings, and by the end of 1977, 7 million sets had been sold.
Larry Stevenson, a lifeguard who published the surfing magazine Surf Guide, founded Makaha skateboards in 1963, naming the company for a famous Hawaiian surf beach. In 1969 he introduced the kicktail, curving up the rear of the board so a rider could launch it off the ground with the feet. He received a patent in 1971 but could not get most companies to pay royalties. The shape spread anyway. Most boards now have kicktails at both ends, an idea Stevenson also patented.
The ollie, the jump at the heart of modern skateboarding, carries a nickname. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the late 1970s, Alan "Ollie" Gelfand began popping no-hands airs. He described the first ones as accidents, caused by a poorly built, steeper-than-vertical wall that threw his board back up to his feet. Rivals were so baffled that some stole his Vans, convinced he had planted Velcro or suction pads on them. Reconstructive surgery on both knees ended his short pro career in 1981, but his nickname became the name of the trick.
Rodney Mullen was a freestyle skater when he took Alan Gelfand's ollie off the ramp. In 1982 he worked out how to pop the board into the air on flat ground, the move that later carried skaters up curbs, over benches and onto handrails. In 1983 he added the "magic flip," which became the kickflip, and in the years that followed came the heelflip, the 360 flip and many more. The Skateboarding Hall of Fame says he essentially built modern skateboarding from the ground up.