Ahead of the Paris Olympics 2024, a look at India’s skateboarding journey so far Premium

Discover the rise of skateboarding in India, from viral sensations to Olympic dreams, shaping a new generation of athletes.

Three years ago, a video of a little girl — frock flying, helmet locked in to control unruly locks, knee guards and protective gear in place — went viral. Five-year-old Janaki Anand, on a skateboard as big as her, wouldn’t know; she was busy shredding the stairs and doing other tricks, watched on by curious onlookers and her proud parents.

It wasn’t just her skill that was noticed back then. Skateboarding, a sport so alien in India that most people think of it as a public nuisance, has been having a moment ever since its debut as a competitive sport at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It made many Indians sit up and take note of the newest medal possibility, and since then, an increasing number of youngsters have picked up the board-on-wheels, aided by a developing infrastructure and growing recognition for the sport. Anand, meanwhile, has gone from girl wonder to multiple-times national champion, and is finding more skate-buddies her age.

“Janaki has known about skating ever since she was little. We were in Dubai back then and I used to go around on a skateboard; it is a very common thing to do there. My elder son Rehan too does it, so Janaki has always seen a board at our home. It was two years ago, when we decided to return, that she became known as the youngest skateboarder in India,” says her father Anand Thampi from Kollam, Kerala.

Skateboarding, for a lot of people, is a quintessential American sport. More than a sport, it is a lifestyle, with its own vocabulary for the various tricks performed. Shredding, for instance, is the act of skating down surfaces like stairs, using parts of the board other than the wheels, and requires tremendous skill. 

Mumbai-based Urmila Pabale, who began skateboarding about three-and-a-half years ago, only knew of it as something Peter Parker did. It was very Hollywood. “I have been roller-skating since I was five and have always been into sports and the outdoors, but even for me it was a surreal experience to see people on skateboards in India for the first time. It was just after the lockdown, I was 16, and had heard of a newly-built skate park in Navi Mumbai, near my home. I went there and just stared — this was something I had only seen in the Spiderman movies,” says the final-year communications student of Khalsa College.

There is no denying the cool quotient of the activity that attracts most children to it in the first place. Sareena Coutinho, also from Mumbai, and at 20 a veteran of the women’s skateboarding community, admits she started out for a lark. Pune’s Shraddha Gaikwad, 18, who won gold at the 2022 National Games held in Gujarat — the only time skateboarding featured in the competition; it was dropped in the Goa edition last year and its fate remains uncertain this year — picked it up by chance, getting on a spare board while delivering lunch to her security guard father who worked at a sporting goods store. They all agree that once boarded, it is difficult to get off the wooden plank.

Most skaters in India are students — either in school or college, with the average age being 20-22 years — and while it is not easy to manage studies with skateboarding, the thrill of it makes it all worthwhile. And then there is Bengaluru-based Gautham Kamath, who, at 36, is the grand old man of Indian skateboarding but more importantly, the founder of Jugaad, the first and biggest open skateboarding competition in the country, founded in 2016.