© Hannah Bailey courtesy of the Skate Exchange

On a balmy January afternoon in Rio de Janeiro, Aori Nishimura, one of the world’s best skateboarders, is staring down the Street League Super Crown skate arena, preparing to take her competition-defining run in front of a stadium full of screaming fans. With every competition she places in this year, the 17-year-old Japanese athlete inches closer to the honour of representing her country in skateboarding’s first ever turn in the Olympic Games, in her hometown of Tokyo in 2020. It will be the biggest stage women’s skateboarding has ever been given, and despite controversy surrounding the sport’s departure from its underground roots, it represents a life-changing opportunity that Nishimura and her competitors are taking very seriously.Read more: Women's Skateboarding Comes In From The Margins[#instagram:https://www.instagram.com/p/BpG13_jhYDd/]

Nishimura pulls up a leg of her camo cargo pants and steps onto her Deathwish skateboard. Gliding into the skate park, she builds speed with every push, her dyed blonde hair catching the wind beneath her black helmet. She swoops up a ramp, leaps into the air and guides her board forward to slide perpendicularly down a railing, landing seemingly impossibly in a 180-degree turn. The slick continuity of the lipslide, as the trick is called, is pulled off so seamlessly that even she can’t help but put her hands to her face in disbelief. With a near perfect score of 9.0, she’s just become a favorite for Olympic gold.

“I see skateboarding as more of a fun activity than a sport,” Nishimura tells me a month earlier in Tokyo’s Komazawa skate park. “So if it’s going to be an Olympic sport, I really want to show the world how fun skateboarding is, and how cool the culture of skateboarding is.” She’s at the park to meet her friends and fiercest competitors, Nanaka Fujisawa, Lacey Baker, Alexis Sablone, Mariah Duran, Jenn Soto, and Samarria Brevard, all of whom have carved out time for an impromptu skate session while in town for an historical skate exposition called The Skate Exchange. Within an hour of their arrival, a massive crowd has formed around the park’s perimeter, proof of female skateboarders' new and unprecedented magnetic pull. Beyond merely a high-flying spectacle, they’ve become household names – names that, crisply pronounced, pepper the din of Japanese conversation: “Lacey Baker,” “Samarria Brevard,” and “Alexis Sablone.”Read more: Serena Williams Urges Women To "Dream Crazier" In Empowering New Nike Advert

The cool capital of skateboarding culture is something fashion has been tapping into for the past decade (who could forget Daria Werbowy sporting a tangerine skate deck instead of a shirt in the Céline SS11 campaign, or the worldwide controversy that was the AW15 Vetements Thrasher hoodie), and now the Olympics are following suit. The mass appeal of skateboarding is at an all time high. In Tokyo its reverberations are everywhere. Beneath a colossal billboard of Nishimura flashing a megawatt smile in Shibuya Crossing, the city’s busiest intersection, masses of stylish youth pass by in her sponsor Nike SB’s clothing, Palace hoodie sweatshirts, Supreme hats, and at least one pair of lavender Adidas Matchcourt RX sneakers (American skater Nora Vasconcellos’s pro model). Most of these kids have never set foot on a skateboard.

According to Josh Friedberg, World Skate director of skateboarding and CEO of USA Skateboarding, it’s skating’s built-in and exponentially growing audience that caught the attention of both the Olympics and the networks paying billions to broadcast the games. “The average age of the summer Olympics viewer is 55. [Networks] want to engage younger audiences. Skateboarding has the power to do that.” The hope is that skateboarding will do for the summer Olympics what snowboarding did for the winter games, engaging a broader audience and exponential endorsement opportunities for both advertisers and the athletes. This is great news for the women of professional skateboarding, marking a moral and tactical shift in the industry of skateboarding finally affording its female athletes major sponsorships, international exposure, and the opportunity to make a living wage through the sport – travel budgets included.[#image: /photos/5d544b39b89c2a00085bfa04]

The Skate Exchange is history’s first ever for-women-by-women skate excursion unrelated to contests. Male skaters have been enjoying these kinds of pleasure cruises since the inception of the skateboarding industry, thanks to salaries and travel budgets from sponsors to tour the world, film video parts, and entertain creative pursuits. Dogtown icon Stacy Peralta recently reminisced on Instagram about a similar cultural exchange trip he made to Australia in 1974. Despite women’s participation in every development of skateboarding, starting with its genesis some time in the ‘50s in California, women didn’t even see their first salaried pro skater until 1998, when Elissa Steamer was signed to Toy Machine.

The Skate Exchange is just the latest glass ceiling that skating veteran Mimi Knoop has broken through for her female colleagues. Since she and trailblazer Cara Beth Burnside (the first woman to have her own skate shoe and the first woman to be featured on the cover of Thrasher in 1989) formed Action Sports Alliance in 2005, Knoop has been working tirelessly to make skateboarding a viable profession for women. It was Knoop who secured equal contest prize purses for men and women in 2008; the World Surf League didn’t bestow that basic right on its female athletes until last year. And Knoop who has led the charge for disassembling every misogynistic patriarchal precedent she and her female colleagues had inured, including contest exclusion, dawn practice times, and marginalised (at best) events and media coverage. Read more: Meet Two British Female Winter Olympic Medal Hopefuls

Knoop’s mission has has been given a considerable boost since the announcement of skateboarding’s addition to the 2020 Olympic roster. “It got so serious overnight,” says the 40-year-old brunette, taking a break from setting up the expo’s sponsor posters from ANA airlines, JTB and Levi’s outside of Murasaki Skate Park. “It went from everyone fighting to make stuff happen to then [having] this crazy schedule for sponsors and contests. It’s just next level.” Over dinner at an izakaya in Shinagawa, Samarria Brevard, who became the first African-American woman to sign with a major skate brand, Enjoi, at the end of 2016, confirms the insanity, rattling off the cities that she’s been flown to in the last year to compete and film video parts.

Screen time for women in skate videos is radically new. Women-only skate videos are still rare. It was only eight years ago that Thrasher’s coveted and competitive “King of the Road” series invited a then 18-year-old Lacey Baker on as a “mystery guest.” The magazine’s late editor-in-chief, Jake Phelps, introduced her by saying, “Your mystery guest, should you decide to choose HER!” Gender was a punchline. Worse, before Baker’s diminutive spot, she was asked, “If you had to, would you skate naked?” Cut to 2018, when Baker shared equal screen time with the greatest working athletes of any sport in Nike’s latest Just Do It commercial. Amidst shots of LeBron James ascending into a layup, Serena Williams fist pumping victory after victory, and headline-making American football star Colin Kaepernick walking down a city street, Baker skates confidently into view. “Don’t believe you have to be like anybody to be somebody,” says the voiceover. The perfect rejoinder.

Baker’s success never came easily. She’s among the least likely candidates for mass appeal: an openly queer former foster kid with hair buzzed within a centimetre of her scalp who refused to femme up her look for marketing benefits years ago. “When I was younger, the industry and my sponsors were pushing for me to wear women’s clothing and be feminine and I did do it for a bit. I wore the tight pants and flared jeans and shit and I remember how uncomfortable I was.” She pushed back. The sponsorships dried up. “The timing was bizarre – I was in Thrasher and winning contests, I did not deserve to get phased out.” She skated through it, supporting herself as a graphic designer. Now, with titles from X Games, Slam City Jam, and the SLS Super Crown under her belt, her endorsement deals include her own signature rose-covered Spitfire skate wheels, pro-model decks with Meow, and a cultish black Nike trainer with an eye stitched on the back to symbolise the importance of visibility. “Rarely in this industry do I feel totally seen. [With Meow and Nike,] I just get to be myself and valued for that. That’s the biggest change – it’s immense. I’m super grateful for that.”

Baker, along with the rest of the Skate Exchange attendees, quit her day job last year (Mariah Duran at a pizza parlour, Jenn Soto as a cafe sous chef). No longer are women skateboarders bound to fit into an ideal or living contest to contest, competing in hopes of supporting what could once only be a hobby. “For so many years I was told, ‘You’re great, but there’s just no market’ over and over,” remembers Alexis Sablone, who recently used her New Balance sponsorship (she’s now represented by Converse) to put herself through architecture grad school at MIT, and just last year rented an art studio in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The visibility goes a long way for the athletes – Asian Games winner Margielyn Didal is able to subsidise her family’s groceries and utilities – and also for their communities. Two skate parks are being built in Didal’s honor in the Philippines, including one in her hometown of Cebu, where parks were non-existent and street skating is illegal. Nishimura has seen more parks with more challenging apparatus added around Japan. “I hope we get more rails,” she says. And in the United States, parks are popping up all over the country, which, along with a new promise of lucrative opportunities, draw supportive parents to drop their daughters off to practice tricks for the afternoon.Read more: Dina Asher-Smith On Modern Life And Keeping Your Self-Esteem Intact

It was at one such park in Venice, California last year that a 10-year-old, half British half Japanese girl named Sky Brown made history by becoming the first female skateboarder to ever land a 720-degree jump – the gravity-taunting feat recorded for her 341,000 Instagram followers. Last week, she broke boundaries again by becoming the UK’s youngest Olympian, officially signing onto our national skateboarding team. The groundbreaking news stirred up a backlash. Despite Brown’s age-belying resume, she says, “Some people are saying I’m too small or I don’t have the power. I’m going to fight to show that age [and] gender [don’t] matter. I can’t wait to do my thing.”[#instagram:https://www.instagram.com/p/BvK8ER0l7HL/]

Brown is emblematic of the growing roster of dedicated professional athletes making women’s skateboarding more impressive – with more complex combination tricks, higher jumps, and higher stakes. Stepping off of an open-air halfpipe with a knockout view of Tokyo Tower, Soto beams when talking about how lucky she feels that it’s her job to wake up and skate. She has started doing private cross training sessions weekly to build the strength and stamina that practically radiate from her body. Imagine Tigger doing vert. Duran, for her part, has been able to double down on teaching herself tricks on rails – playbook additions that helped her to X Games gold and the $50,000 prize.

On the final day of their stay in Tokyo, Baker, Sablone, Soto, and Duran are told they have been officially chosen by the United States to train for the Olympics – an announcement held under wraps until today. This means their government will pay them to train, including access to fitness trainers, physical therapists, and nutritionists. That night, in a private room of a multi-storey karaoke bar, Baker is showboating on the mic, dropping to her knees before lying across the back of a booth to sing “Wonderwall” by Oasis with surprising vocal ability to Knoop, replacing “maybe” with “Mimi”. “You’re going to be the one who saves me,” she sings. It’s in jest as much as it’s in gratitude. Tomorrow she’ll be on a plane to Australia with Nike to film with Elissa Steamer, Leticia Bufoni, and a group of beer-slinging men (she will later euphemistically describe their “hyper-masculine vibes”). Then it’s on to zeroing in on holding her spot on the USA Olympic team. But at this moment, Baker is singing to the woman who helped make her life possible with the women she’s making history alongside. Because of them, the road for women’s skateboarding is freshly paved. Smoother than ever before.