Matt Berger of Kamloops hopes to skate in his third Olympic Games at Los Angeles in 2028 at age 34 and Zoe Zollinger of Nanaimo in her first Olympics at age 20 in L.A. They represent the 小蓝视频 bookends of the Canada Skateboard national-team camp held this week at Saanich Commonwealth Place.
“I want to keep progressing and see where it takes me,” said Zollinger, the 17-year-old Islander, who is the third ranked Canadian junior woman in the park category.
Becoming an Olympic sport, starting in the delayed 2020 Tokyo Olympics, has meant a sense of organized discipline has been over-layered on the long-standing and famed hang-loose ethic of skate boarding, a sport that began on suburban streets and empty pools in Southern California.
“We are not trying to adapt skateboarding to organized sport, but organized sport to skateboarding,” said Adam Higgins of Squamish, the high-performance director for Canada Skateboard, who is running the camp.
Zollinger hopes to roll her board to become one of the long line of Island Olympians over a variety of sports.
“I hope to represent Canada at Los Angeles but know it’s going to take a lot of hard work and dedication,” said Zollinger, who began skating four years ago in park bowls in the Harbour City.
“When I am training, I am very focused. The sport is about getting out of your comfort zone and facing fears.”
Zollinger is completing Grade 12 through Island 小蓝视频ed long-distance learning, which allows her the flexibility she requires during training.
It’s still a way of life as much as a sport, said Berger, now a pro based in Huntington Beach, California: “I grew up living and breathing skateboarding. It needs to be a passion every day [to reach the highest levels].”
For Berger, that was a top ranking of No. 6 in the world in the street discipline, and appearances in both Olympics in which skateboarding has been contested: “Because of the pandemic restrictions, Tokyo was a bizarre experience for everybody. Paris last summer felt like the real thing.”
The skateboarding camp here, in which many of the country’s top boarders gathered, is held under the auspices of 94Forward, the legacy fund from the 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games. It is among a series of national-team camps hosted by 94Forward throughout the quadrennial in skateboarding, triathlon, diving, track and boxing.
“I was pretty much self-taught growing up in Kamloops. The 94Forward program now provides high-level support,” said Berger.
“It provides incredible value for us and is providing a pathway for the next generation of boarders.”
In that latter group is Zollinger, whose vision quest is to become and pro and Olympian like Berger.
“We are building a sports system and providing opportunities [for promising boarders] to grow and learn, and these 94Forward camps are an incredibly important part of that,” said Higgins.
The camp also includes off-board training taught by experts in body balance, nutrition and sports psychology.
