When I was in my early teens, I took up skateboarding. I wanted so badly to be good at it and I practiced obsessively for a brief period of time. Now, I'm a pretty coordinated guy, and I've played a lot of sports in my day, but skateboarding just didn't come easily to me. At my peak, I could cleanly land a single kick flip probably about 10% of the time, and not while moving, and I was damn proud of it. So when I first saw a Rodney Mullen video, I had the same reaction as I would have had if you would have shown me a video of someone slam dunking on a 20 foot tall hoop or someone hitting an 800 ft home run. His moves just didn't seem possible. I have high hopes that I will live to see skateboarding as an Olympic event (based on the success of snowboarding and its international popularity and the fact that it seems to take as much skill, coordination, and athletic ability as most other Olympic events [I mean, lets face it, it is probably more deserving than Trampolining or Curling], but I'll save that for another day) so that guys like Rodney Mullen can enjoy the same kind of fame as Shaun White. Until then, enjoy this video:
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