I didn’t know how big Olympics were: Skateboard champion Sakura Yosozumi

SINGAPORE – Effortlessly cool like many of her tribe, Sakura Yosozumi is executing ollies and flips while skating a bowl in Orchard Road over the weekend.

The Japanese also owns the cool tag of being the world’s first skateboarding Olympic gold medallist, after clinching the first title on offer – the women’s park – in the sport’s debut at the 2020 Tokyo Games.

While many athletes see an Olympic gold as a lifelong goal, Yosozumi, however, never dreamt of becoming an Olympic champion. That was because she had never watched the multi-sport event before competing in one.

Speaking to The Straits Times via a translator, the 21-year-old said: “I didn’t know how big an event the Olympics were. I had actually never seen it before.

“But, after participating in the Olympics, I realised that being the gold medallist was a very big thing and the Olympics were really a major event globally.

“I wasn’t skateboarding to join the Olympics. So when they decided to put skateboarding as a sport in the Olympics, I was very surprised.”

Yosozumi was in town for the opening of the sports-themed attraction Trifecta last Saturday, when she also conducted a skate clinic for enthusiasts.

Touted as Asia’s first snow, surf and skate attraction, the venue, which is located next to the Somerset Skate Park, allows participants to take part in these sports in Singapore’s shopping district. As part of its launch festival, a two-day concert will also be held on Nov 18 and 19.

With skateboarding now part of the Olympic roster, the venue will give budding young athletes a place to learn and compete in the sport, and perhaps become an Olympic champion like Yosozumi.

The skateboarder, whose first name means cherry blossom in Japanese, picked up the sport at only 11 after encouragement from her elder brother.

The Wakayama prefecture native would regularly take five-hour round-trips to the skateparks of Mie, Osaka and Kobe before a local business lent her a warehouse space to build her own ramps for training.

Recalling her start, Yosozumi, who also won an Asian Games gold in 2018, said: “The biggest challenge I had was trying to land my first trick called the ollie and I couldn’t flick the tail of the skateboard good enough.”

She was certainly good enough for gold at the Tokyo Games in 2021, when she

won a historic title.

Repeating the feat in Paris 2024, where skateboarding will be at the famous Place de La Concorde in the French capital, will put her in the record books again.

While her focus in 2024 will be to prepare as hard as she can to win back-to-back titles in Paris, Yosozumi’s hopes her win in Japan can inspire others to follow her path and change perceptions of the sport around the world.

She said: “When I picked up skateboarding and wanted to pursue this professionally, a lot of people were against it because they have a stereotyped image of skateboarding, being a very underground culture kind of thing rather than a sport.

“But after skateboarding was in the Olympics, people started to recognise it as an actual sport and I started receiving a lot of encouragement to pursue it further and further.

“In order to advocate skateboarding, it is very important for people to treat it not just as an underground culture but as an actual sport in order to bring it forward.”