Skateboarding prodigy and Olympic hopeful Sky Brown is always looking up — Assembly

A devastating fall won’t stop the 12-year-old from attempting her greatest feat yet — becoming Britain’s youngest Olympian at the Tokyo Games in 2021.

Assembly's Game Changers series features female athletes around the world who defy convention on and off the field.

If champion skateboarder Sky Brown had to pick a favourite trick, she’d choose the 540, a difficult move that involves the 12-year-old rotating a full 540 degrees on her board before landing. While the prospect of hurling one’s body into the air and landing on a two-feet piece of wood might be terrifying, Sky finds it exhilarating. She already has her sights on mastering the 720, which involves two full mid-air rotations.

“I kind of like the feeling when the trick is a little scary,” shares Sky. “I try to picture the trick in my head and just try to do the same thing.” Learning a new aerial move involves falling — a lot. But Sky isn’t afraid. “I don’t really get scared of hurting myself, I just think it’s part of skateboarding, it’s kind of part of life,” she says. In June 2020, Sky sustained a serious injury after a spill while training, fracturing her skull and breaking bones in her left hand and wrist. But she maintained her positive outlook in a video message to her fans from the hospital, sharing, “It's OK to fall sometimes. I'm just going to get back up and push even harder.”

Since becoming the world’s youngest professional skateboarder in 2018, Sky’s list of accomplishments keeps growing: winning bronze at the 2019 World Skateboarding Championship, finishing fifth at the 2019 X Games skateboarding event, becoming a published author and signing a sponsorship deal with Nike.

Sky began skateboarding at the age of 3. “I would not play with any toys, it would just be my skateboard. I didn’t want to walk anywhere. I would just go on my skateboard into the supermarket or even skate in the house,” she remembers.

Her little brother Ocean is also becoming an accomplished skater in his own right. “I love skating with my brother,” Sky shares. “He is really fun to skate with. I like it because we will be like, ‘Who can make this trick first?’ And how he kind of pushes me too.”

Skateboarding allows Sky to spend quality time with her brother and express herself through her moves on the board. “You can add your own style to it. You can add your own tricks to it. It’s a lot like dancing,” she reflects. “It just makes me feel so happy and free.”

Before the pandemic started, Sky was focusing on her next great feat: qualifying for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, where skateboarding was set to make its Olympic debut. Despite the Tokyo Games’ delay until 2021, Sky is staying optimistic and focusing on her training so that she can become Great Britain’s youngest-ever Olympian (and maybe even reach the podium).

Sky may be an athletic prodigy, but she is just like any other social savvy Gen Zer when it comes to sharing about her life in Japan and in the U.S. (with the help of her British father Stu and Japanese mother Mieko). Sky posts about her many interests with fans, including surfing, dancing and making TikToks. She now has nearly 500k followers on TikTok, 600k followers on Instagram and 150k subscribers on YouTube.

Through training videos and shots of her gravity-defying tricks, Sky’s social presence also helps dismantle conventional notions that skateboarding is just a sport for boys. “Don’t care what people think,” she advises other girls who want to skateboard. “Sometimes maybe you’ll be the only girl in there and you’ll feel, ‘Oh no, I shouldn’t go,’ but just do you.”