Go to a spot popular with skateboarders today, and be prepared to encounter a curious breed: the senior-citizen skater. All things being relative, the skaters in question are usually between thirty and thirty-eight years old. There are still older riders, no doubt, but these must be classified as a shade more geriatric. It is possible that precise age has less to do with it than how often you step on a board. In any case, the breed tends to give itself away less by appearance than by their little pauses for conversation. “I used to have energy like that,” a specimen like myself might be heard saying wistfully between short breaths, indicating some limber teen-ager flying past. Alternatively, it could be a remark about the mysterious pain in their right thigh, or laughter as their whole lower half refuses to submit to even humble demands. Just as often, though, the talk is of ancient videos and favorite skaters from the past.

Old-man body aches aside, mature skaters have a fair amount to smile about these days. There are ubiquitous short boards and long boards, if you’re into those, and reissues of classic decks, like Gonz’s original Vision model, or Vallely’s red-eyed-elephant board. Documentaries have been trickling out, about Hosoi, Gator, Rocco and, famously, Dogtown and the Z-Boys; Stacey Peralta’s next film, about the Bones Brigade, is due to première this summer. And, improbably in this twilight of print, new magazines have surfaced. Among these are the old-school-oriented The Skateboarder’s Journal—the latest issue has a feature on clay wheels—and 43, a grass-roots mag out of Brooklyn.

The most fascinating elements of all this activity are the online interviews. Skate history is usually restricted to magazines, company video footage of riders, and of abuses chronicled on benches, rails, curbs, and blocks, which skaters can read like the tracks of animals. But some new oral histories are changing that. “Epicly Later’d,” a loose and often candid series directed by Patrick O’Dell at Vice, looks at the careers of professionals past and present—a featured rider’s reminiscences may turn on anything under the sun, and include snippets of old unseen video. As if sensing the potential for a broader oral history of the sport, Transworld, arguably the best equipped to do it, is working on a project of their own.

Transworld is one of the two most central skating magazines—the other being the more punk-minded Thrasher—and has long been distinguished for its emphasis on progression and on the high calibre of its photos. The (http://skateboarding.transworld.net/tag/30th-anniversary-interviews/), occasioned by a thirtieth anniversary, are coming out gradually over the course of the year. The magazine’s editors selected thirty of the most influential pro skaters and then tracked them down to talk. In five-to ten-minute profiles, the skaters discuss their careers and are quizzed on the subject of influence. Mainly, the focus is on who they think the five most influential skaters are, which one is at the top of that list, and which figure inspired them the most. The pros represented go as far back as Tony Alva (born 1957), and as forward as Paul Rodriguez (or “P-Rod,” born 1984). The project crystallizes all manner of things to do with skating and the extent to which it has changed.

The very names on Transworld’s roster suggest the great distance between P-Rod’s time, with its corporate sponsorships and handsome X Games checks, and that of Alva or Duane Peters. Look at footage of different eras, and you’ll see the transformation is incarnate in skateboards themselves. To reach their current streamlined state, they had to first go through fishtails, snub noses, and double kicks; clay wheels, chunky wheels, and preposterously tiny ones. If you want to test a skater’s age, see if they know what you mean by amusing accessories like “lappers” or “copers.” These morphological shifts were worked out through trial-and-error, with technical progression and the seeming whims of certain pros. Skaters, too, look different than they used to. Born near the beach, they’ve subsequently been influenced by punk and hip-hop, and though there’s a good deal of internal variety, have come up with their own urban aesthetic. The broad popularity of discreet, un-sporty-looking sneakers is pretty much due to skaters, outsiders just a moment ago.

But the most striking evolution implicit in the new skate histories, and a theme unsettling to old skaters everywhere, relates to the things that can be done on a board now. What’s the nature of that advance, and how did it come about? The short answer lies in street skating. Originally an activity that mimicked pool and ramp riding, in the mid- to late eighties street became creative and challenging in its own right; it was, after all, the kind of skating that could be done almost anywhere. “Ollies,” the no-handed leap around which modern skateboarding exists, got bigger and bigger; skaters held onto their boards less, and no longer cared so much about jump ramps. People like Mark Gonzales and Natas Kaupas were especially to thank, capitalizing on architecture in new ways, and looking aslant to the more technical branch of freestyle skating for ideas. Helped in part by the rise of video, which spread news and spurred competition, skaters then stepped on the accelerator. In hindsight, the level of difficulty and sophistication street skating acquired in such a brief period is frankly astonishing. From “Streets on Fire,” in 1989, to three H-Street videos in three years, to, crucially, Blind’s “Video Days,” in 1991, the groundwork for a kind of revolution was laid.

Interestingly, this was just at the time when skating was about to undergo a steep dip in popularity. The early to mid-nineties are mostly recalled by skaters as a time of funny tricks and super-baggy pants, of random mockery by the public. Gone were the days when everybody knew about Powell, when Cab won high-air contests and pretty girls mewled around Hosoi. Many skaters now did hard, often ugly-looking moves; ridiculously, transition skating was even derided, for a time making it impossible for such pros to make a living. And yet, at the same time, the innovation begun in the eighties marched on. Gradually, people could land flip tricks (where the board flips in different ways under your feet while you remain in the air) cleaner, faster, and more consistently. And in a stroke, the full realization of the concept of switch-stance—doing tricks going the other way, like someone deliberately pitching with their non-preferred arm—effectively doubled what could be done. To top it all off, the best ramp skaters learned what nobody would have dreamed of, which was to make the new, ultra-precise street tricks compatible with twelve-foot-tall half-pipes. These skaters were indeed obscure and comically dressed. But most skaters in 1992, viewing Plan B’s “Questionable Video”—in which Pat Duffy faced terrifying handrails with a matador’s nerve and in the rain, and Mike Carroll reminded us that San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza was a brilliant laboratory, a sort of Silicon Valley of skating—understood that they were witnessing something extraordinary. There was no telling what each new video would prove possible.

Such unwritten lore might explain why half the names in Transworld’s list are of skaters that were most prominent in the nineties. There were far fewer companies and pros before that decade, and what happened afterward has mostly built on it. Which is not at all to say that the skating before was any less amazing, or that what happens now, in our more professionalized, quasi-athletic era, is any less good. If anything, it’s better: at once burly and technical, with much more open-mindedness about tricks and a widespread readiness to skate all kinds of terrain. Ask anyone: they’ll tell you that the level of the present generation is laughably, even dispiritingly high, and would have been unthinkable in the past. It’s just that others took us there first.

Transworld’s series is nicely revealing about who skaters are. The popular notion of skaters tends to be as adolescent (often true, speaking purely demographically), male (ditto), unruly and anti-social (there are shades to that). So, yes, there’s some fact there. “Skateboarding is not a crime,” a famous sticker from the eighties, was so popular in part because skaters knew and liked that it was a crime. Skaters do grind and mark things and take chances in people’s empty pools; the constant dodge and chase of security guards has always been an occupational hazard. (A regular feature in skateboard videos, much like skits in rap records, is clips of encounters with authority or otherwise humorous pedestrians.) But skaters are a far more diverse and accepting bunch than most people tend to recognize. It makes sense: their obsession has tricks, not rules, and nobody’s there to tell you which ones to do. Style is valued above all, and both tricks and terrain expand with people’s imaginings. With reason, some like to say that skating is an art.