Teenage skateboard sensation Sky Brown: ‘There is an even bigger fire in my heart to prove people wrong’

Exclusive: 16-year-old fancied to become Britain’s youngest-ever Olympic champion at Paris Games but is also targeting surfing in 2028

A swarming team of helpers follow her every step, but over the course of two hours one spring morning on the River Thames it is noticeable that the most serene person of all is the teenage object of attention.
Sky Brown has just arrived in London on an overnight flight from her Los Angeles home. She will begin the day by skateboarding on a floating ramp in front of Tower Bridge and end it on The One Show at the BBC.
In between, she fulfils myriad sponsor requests before touching back down in California for the normality of a 5am surf the next day, home cooking by father Stu, homeschooling led by mother Mieko, and hanging out with what she calls her “crew” at the local skateboard park.
“She’s a superstar,” observes Andy Macdonald, her 50-year-old British Olympic team-mate and himself a legend of the sport. “She’s super, super talented. Beyond skateboarding, she’s an avid surfer – and I’m sure she could be doing back-flips on motocross next week if she decided. She’s like a unicorn. We haven’t seen anything like her before as far as marketability.”
Brown herself is rather more circumspect but quietly engaging, particularly when our conversation drifts from familiar topics such as her daily routines and whether she can win Olympic gold to her motivations and ambitions. And the more she talks, the more relaxed and expansive she becomes.
“I definitely have other things I want to do – other goals and other dreams,” she says. “I always loved teaching – and especially teaching in underprivileged places. That is something I’m really passionate about.
“I have been travelling to places since I was little. I went to Cambodia to a deaf school where they have a site for skateboarding. I saw how big the smile was on their faces when they learnt a new trick. I want to do that more.
“I kind of want to get into acting a little bit – do some shows. I think that would be really interesting. I did dancing and that was a really good experience. Acting could be another. I have a lot of things that I want to do in my life.”
In that, she has certainly made a fast start. By the age of eight, Brown was already drawing attention, applause and gasps in any skateboard park she visited. At 10, she became the youngest professional athlete to sign a contract with Nike. Aged 13, she became Britain’s youngest Olympic medallist. She was world champion at 14, and she is now favourite over the next two weeks to become the youngest-ever British Olympic champion. With more than three million TikTok and Instagram followers, she also has an influence that transcends her sport like only Tom Daley in Team GB’s 327-strong Paris party.
Neil Ellis, the head of engagement at Skateboard UK, highlights a vast knock-on participation boost from what we might call the “Sky effect” following her Olympic bronze. “As with all sports, some people just have ‘it’,” he says. “I first saw her when she was 10, and you could see that sparkle. It’s a combination of things in skateboarding: natural balance, fearlessness on the board, determination and resilience; the way you attack a trick again and again and again, and obviously she has got unbelievable skill as well as great parents who help her. She takes it all in her stride.”
Brown herself is acutely aware of her capacity to inspire. “I have a motto since I was young: ‘Be brave, be strong, have fun, do it because you love it and don’t let anyone stop you’,” she says. “It tells my story, too, and there’s definitely a message in there.”
Her Olympic story would begin when Brown’s father, who travels the world with her, constructed a skatepark mini-ramp in their back yard. The ramp was meant for Stu, who did not want his then three-year-old daughter getting on a skateboard.
“But I saw how cool it looked, how fun it looked and so I kept stealing his board,” she says. “I didn’t walk anywhere, I just wanted to skate. It was hard for my parents in the beginning. They did not want me to compete. They were afraid that it was going to make it not fun. They just wanted me to enjoy it, but I think they know now that I just love it.”
There were initially also sceptics inside what was a male-dominated sport. “For sure, growing up, being a little girl in a skatepark full of boys, I definitely got the look,” she says. “It was, ‘What is she doing here … she shouldn’t be here’, but I wanted to prove them wrong.”
Brown has never had formal coaching and prefers simply to learn in a wholly unstructured way from a combination of trial and error, her skateboarding friends in Los Angeles, and what she might pick up on social media.
“I think about it like a dance routine,” she says. “It’s me showing what I love to do to the world while making it look flowy and beautiful. The best part of skating is showing off your new tricks.”
The worst part is the inevitability of some crashes, with Brown suffering particularly horrific injuries, including broken bones in her face and hand, almost exactly a year before Tokyo when she was only 11. Her mother, she says, is “definitely a little traumatised from my accident” but still watches her competitions: “She tells me, ‘You make me so nervous’. I think she enjoys it but is definitely a bit scared.
“The nerves are excitement for me, too. All I want to do when I skate is show my best, make it look beautiful and show how beautiful it is, and can be.”
Macdonald made a point of watching Brown in the final Olympic qualifier in Budapest last month and, although she finished second, he left confident that she would win Olympic gold.
“She was just cruising, just kind of holding back because it’s not the Olympics,” he says. Lola Tambling, whose own Olympic dream was sparked by watching Brown in Tokyo, will be her other team-mate in Paris and simply predicts: “Sky’s going to absolutely kill it.”
Brown herself is equally passionate about surfing and, after missing Olympic qualification only narrowly this summer, very much intends to create another slice of history four years from now in Los Angeles by competing in two separate sports. “I love LA, I live in LA, and so I think it’s a really good chance for me to qualify for both and get two gold medals for Britain,” she says. “People say it’s not possible to do both but that just puts an even bigger fire in my heart to prove them wrong.”
Like skateboarding, it is the wider culture of surfing – and how you learn while socialising and playing with friends – that she most enjoys.
“I don’t really like to go skating and surfing alone, I like having a crew with me that pushes me to skate and surf,” Brown says. “I feel like we make memories that way. Yes, I do have tricks that can be scary, tricks I’ve got to do for a contest, new tricks I want to learn, but it pushes me when I’m with my friends and makes it more efficient. It’s like my playground.
“I like to get up at five-ish and be the first one into the ocean. Come back, eat, do some school, then go skateboarding. If the weather is still good, I’m back in the ocean hanging out with my friends and then I have dinner with my family.
“I still do teenage stuff. I love getting girly, love hanging out with my non-skating and surfing friends. I do miss a little bit not going to school, but a lot of my best friends are competing and travelling the world.
“I’m aiming for my dream and having a lot of fun. Tokyo was amazing. We put on a really big show, but since then skate-boarding has grown and the gender gap has closed. I can’t wait to show the level skateboarding is at now.”