Exactly where have we been, wherever are we now, and wherever is skateboarding going? How to find the best cheap electric skateboard?
The start
If we try to determine the future, it’s probably a smart idea to head back first and see exactly how this thing started.
Everything began in the fifties, whenever Californian surfers started affixing roller skate wheels for you to planks of wood along with riding down their community streets. Skateboard manufacturers began springing up in the early 60s, and a new lifestyle came into this world.
Urethane skateboard wheels were being invented in 1972 and are still employed today. The mid-1970s saw the first skateboard park systems begin to appear, which naturally spawned new styles of using, new tricks and brand-new boards as skaters went vertical. Also, in the middle of the 70s, a new competitive picture was born when a slalom and freestyle contest was held in the Ocean Festival in Delete Mar, California.
The famous Zephyr team turned the professional skateboarding world on its mind with their new aggressive method of freestyle skating. In 1978, the most well-known skate trick of all, the actual “Ollie,” was invented through Alan Gelfand (the seventies were a great decade about skating).
The 80s had been a comparatively slow decade about skateboarding, although an increase came with the popularity of the actual VCR when the first skateboard videos were introduced. The true Bones Brigade Video Display was particularly popular to make Steve Caballero, Tony Hawk, Mike McGill, Lance Hill, Rodney Mullen, Stacy Peralta, and Kevin Staab home names amongst the skating fraternity.
The first Extreme Games were hosted in Rhode Island in 1995. The skateboarding opposition received much attention, ultimately causing increased interest in the sport and raising its profile from the broader community. Skateboarding also became part of the first Winter months X games in ’97, and competitive skateboarding possessed truly became mainstream.
The most important thing to hit skateboarding from the 2000s is the massive use of the video game console. Skateboarding games lend themselves effectively to the format, and there are smash-hit video games annually in the 2000s. New technology of skaters was born while kids traded their system controllers for the real point.
The Future of Skateboarding
Competitive professional skateboarding will be established as a genuine mainstream sport in a very similar way as surfing and surf culture. Just a few years ago, surfers were appeared down upon as untrustworthy reprobates. These days parents don’t believe twice about wandering into the surf stores that exist in most shopping malls and loading on clothes with surf labelling for their offspring, who mightn’t even know what a seaside looks like.
Now, Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning, Rip Curl, Quiksilver, and Billabong are all reliable global brands. Like it, watch for skating to go similar to the way. We’ll see mind-blowing tips leveraging energy and athleticism that would seem unimaginable these days. Skate heroes will go popular and expect to see a more advanced global competitive picture. Once again, it’s instructive to slip on over to surfing’s path.
The competing surfing scene floundered for many years before getting its take action together in the late 80s, once the brave step was come to give a single governing human body ultimate control of the experience. A new man-on-man format ended up being introduced, and contests were being taken to the best waves at the best time of the year.
The complete good of the sport eventually overcame parochialism, and business-oriented interest and poor, uncompetitive contests were discarded. At this point, surfing has hit the main time – it has a complex, multi-tiered competitive scene using massive media coverage. Could skating go the same way? Sure, if it allows itself for you too.
When it comes to local ramps along with skate parks, expect larger walls, bigger bowls and much more of them. As the current skaters grow up and get their turn to possess a say in council investing and infrastructure, it can be good news for skaters who choose parks and ramps.
Technologies will impact skateboards in the same way it’s hitting so many other products. Stronger, lighter components will appear, and the rapid submission of information means that board and truck design will enhance even faster. The impact from the internet is both challenging and an opportunity for the community skateboard shop. Ecommerce expansion rates are huge, and even more, people are keen to buy skateboards online.
The web allows a distribution model that properly puts the consumer closer to typically the skateboard warehouse. If you miss the old days of the 1970’s wooden plank, then this mightn’t do much for you if you’re a kid on a constrained budget. It’s all good reports. Expect better, more officially advanced products at less expensive costs.
If skateboarding follows similar lines as other niche categories, we might see consolidation amongst the big models, identical to Billabong’s acquisition of Market 9. Other big participants in today’s skateboard market are usually brands like Birdhouse, Lady, Zero, Plan B, Aspect and Blind.
There’s a good chance we could see a huge company buy up a well balanced of big skate brands to find the pricing benefit that comes with quantity, which can obviously help with product or service pricing but doesn’t constantly result in original product design and style and creativity (when is the last time Ford or perhaps GM came out with a cool product or service? ).
In any market, in the event the big get bigger, then options arise for small participants to carve out their niche market for local markets in addition to buyers who are less model conscious.
Maple is often the premium construction material to get decks, but surely a single day is approaching when walnut will be superseded, at least for quite a few board styles. New kinds of boards will continue to present themselves – the humble skateboard with the early days has already evolved in longboards, cruisers, retro snowboards, pool boards, old school in addition to mountain boards. As well as light, stronger trucks and top-quality wheels, there’ll be completely new deck plan shapes in addition to the original artwork.
