By: Maggie Z

Skateboarding is a sport that often favors the young, as it involves doing many different tricks and flips of the board that require joint flexibility, which gets harder and harder to maintain as age increases. The gold medalists in the 2021 Olympics, which Tokyo hosted, included a 13-year-old, among others, mostly under the age of 20. Now, Andy Macdonald, who will be 51 years old at the time of the Olympics, has secured himself a place on the British team after earning a top spot at the semifinals in Budapest.

Andy Macdonald was born in the United States but will compete for Great Britain because he has a British father. In an interview after the trials, he told New York Times reporter Victor Mather that he only tried to make the British team but did not expect to make it to the Olympics. “You get three runs,” he said. “I fell on my first two. On my last run I pulled it off. I scored 11 points higher than I had ever scored on the tour. And even then I qualified by the skin of my teeth.”

He added that as you get older, injuries are more important to avoid. “It hurts more when you fall,” he said. “It takes longer to heal. But just don’t stop. That’s how you keep doing it into your 50s. I’ll see them [his teenage teammates] take a fall and think, ‘Man if I fell like that, I’d be out for two weeks.’ And they’ll just bounce right up and be, ‘Let’s try that again.’”

Andy Macdonald informed his coach he’d be attempting his hardest tricks to try and gain more points. He fell on the first two but got back up and didn’t give up. For his last routine, he knew he needed to do something incredible, so he started out his routine with a flip trick (when you rotate the board once in the air under your feet, then catch and land on the board). When he went for the board-flip, he overdid it, and the board drifted in front of him. But he knew he had to make that run count, so he grabbed the board like it was meant to happen and put it under his feet. “In skateboarding, that’s extra points,” he explained. “The judges say, ‘Well he didn’t do the skill correctly, but he should have fallen and he didn’t: Extra points.’”

Andy Macdonald may very well be the oldest skateboarder to qualify for the Olympics, and some might think he’s too old, but he has an attitude that speaks volumes. It tells crowds, “See you in Paris!”