Sky Brown becomes UK’s first skateboarding world champion

Sky Brown has become the UK’s first skateboarding world champion at the age of just 14.

The British-Japanese teenager, who won bronze at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, “produced a dazzling final two runs” to win gold in the park skateboarding category at the world championships in Sharjah, UAE, said The Sun.

Olympic silver medallist Kokona Hiraki led until the final round, but fell on her final attempt, while Tokyo gold medallist Sakura Yosozumi​​​​​ struggled throughout before taking bronze.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Brown told Sky Sports after the event: “Being on the podium with these guys again is so crazy. There’s new girls ripping it and it’s really inspiring.

“I’m really stoked. It’s just been really fun. I was trying to enjoy it as much as I could. Landing all three of my runs was an amazing feeling. I didn’t really know until the end because all the girls are crazy right now,” she added.

Aged 13 years and 28 days, Brown became the UK’s youngest ever Olympic medallist at the Tokyo Games held in 2021.

The skateboarder, who was born in Miyazaki, Japan, to a Japanese mother and British father, competed at the US Open in 2016 at the age of eight and first chose to compete for Great Britain in 2018.

Last year, Brown told the Independent that her next ambition is to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics in both skateboarding and surfing. That will “present practical challenges”, said the news site, given one competition will be held in Paris and the other off the Pacific island of Tahiti. But “Brown has overcome greater challenges already in her burgeoning career,” said the website. “It’s gonna be pretty hard but I’m gonna try my best because I love them both,” she said.

“That feeling, being on the podium, it made me fired up. It made me want to go and get a gold medal next time. It was so fun and I want to do it again,” she said.