Since its inception, skateboarding has been a male-dominated and unequal activity, its risks and sense of freedom mainly attracting younger men. However, contemporary skateboarding is an increasingly diverse subculture, open to variations in ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and age (Beal, 1995; Bäckström & Nairn, 2018; Geckle & Shaw, 2022). In this article, we take as our starting point that mediated memories play a crucial role in (re)forming (sub)cultural belonging and cultural memory among skateboarders (Thurnell-Read, 2021). Skateboard media are not only important sources for learning new tricks and following how skateboarding is progressing around the world, but they are also platforms through which skateboarders represent themselves and negotiate what skateboarding “is” (McDuie-Ra, 2021). As noted by Bäckström and Blackman (2022: 122), skateboarding has “evolved culturally and socially in relation to an always-present mediated context from the early skatezines, via movies and VHS, to present-day videos on the internet”.
In this article, we focus on Sweden, where the cultural memory of skateboarding is strongly shaped by US-mediated influences via niche media such as VHS tapes and specialised magazines. Over time, skateboarding has evolved from a homosocial, masculine, youth-oriented lifestyle sport that typically reproduces normative forms of masculinity and excludes female participants (O’Connor, 2018; Yochim, 2010) to a more diverse, heterosocial activity also practised by “older” participants, some of whom were active in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (O’Connor, 2024). Arguably, the subculture’s mediation has also led to its commodification and its shift from a rebellious subculture to a more inclusive and mainstream activity (Bäckström & Blackman, 2022; Encheva et al., 2013). In this article, we investigate how Swedish ageing male and female skateboarders construct their subcultural past, present, and future, and how this is mediated.
For this, we draw on the concepts of cultural memory in general (Erll et al., 2008; Rigney, 2012; see also Assmann & Czaplicka, 1995) and cinema memory in particular (Jernudd, 2013; Kuhn, 2002, 2011; Kuhn et al., 2017; Maltby et al., 2011; Stacey, 1994; Treveri Genari, 2018; Van de Vijver, 2012). While much research on media and cultural memory distinguishes between men and women across generations, these studies mostly focus on mass media, such as television (Holdsworth, 2011), cinema (Kuhn, 2002), radio (Franzén, 2021), or media technology (Bolin, 2016). We wish to contribute to this body of literature by focusing on skateboarding as a distinctive form of mediated cultural memory, given its subcultural status. As Thurnell-Read (2021: 169) has pointed out, a focus on mass media in relation to memories seems “to exclude the presence of subcultural memories which, by definition, stand at some distance from the institutions of the dominant culture”. This opposition becomes especially visible when examining how ageing skaters negotiate their belonging to the subculture, which is associated with youth and resistance (Lombard, 2016). While research indicates that subcultural groups encompass an increasingly wide range of generations and age groups today (Willing et al., 2019), their subcultural ideals appear to remain rather stable over time (Jacobson, 2024: 4). This makes it relevant to inquire what it means to become “grey” in a context so strongly associated with youth, masculinity, and risk-taking, such as skateboarding (O’Connor, 2024). O’Connor (2024) has suggested “grey spaces” as a concept that can be used to explore not only the spaces of leisure as grey spaces (concrete bowls, the grey urban backstage) but also to serve as an analytical tool for understanding identity transitions as participants age, becoming grey-haired skaters within what is traditionally viewed as youth sports. At the same time, the subculture inevitably changes as niche skateboarding media increasingly recognise middle-aged skateboarders as legitimate skaters, and it has been argued that such representations empower and motivate middle-aged skateboarders to continue skateboarding as they grow older (O’Connor, 2018: 931). Our focus on subcultural memory enables us to investigate how mediated subcultural memory is negotiated in the context of skateboarding and what this may add to existing studies of mediated cultural memory, for example, in terms of embodiment.
In the first part of this article, we elaborate on cultural and cinema memory as theoretical concepts and review the previous literature on skateboarding as a subculture and ageing in the sport. After presenting our methodology, we discuss our empirical findings in conversation with these previous studies, followed by our concluding remarks.
Cultural memory studies and studies of cinema memory align in conceiving of memory as fundamentally social (Rigney, 2012). In their foundational work, Assmann and Czaplicka (1995: 125) noted that “the specific character that a person derives from belonging to a distinct society and culture is […] a result of socialization and customs”. Cultural memory, they contended, is maintained through “cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments) and institutional communication (recitation, observance)” (Assman & Czaplicka, 1995: 129). Given the prominence of media in society, they are indispensable in shaping and spreading cultural memory (Erll, 2011: 114), “perhaps especially audiovisual media” (Kuhn et al., 2017: 4). Much of this work builds on Maurice Halbwachs’s (1992) sociological perspective on how collective memory and remembering are institutionalised through cultural means (such as audiovisual media) and through practices of commemoration, which makes memory an active process that has both cultural and personal resonance.
Memories are crucial to our identities, as we understand who we are in the present by continually interpreting the stories of our past. This includes cultural meanings surrounding age and ageing, the groups or contexts we belong to, and how one should act at different stages in life (Jacobson, 2024). Subcultures are interesting to investigate, as they are strongly marked by insiders and outsiders, united around a shared interest, and often associated with an opposition to values associated with adulthood (Thornton, 1997).
In skateboarding studies, despite increased participation of middle-aged skateboarders in skateboard culture, few international studies (Wheaton, 2013; Willing et al., 2019) and none in Sweden have examined middle-aged skateboarders’ experiences of gender and ageing. Critical research on skateboarding has, for obvious reasons, mostly focused on young people (Bäckström & Blackman, 2022). An exception is O’Connor’s (2018, 2021, 2024) work on middle-aged male skateboarders in the UK, examining the importance of time as a resource for subcultural belonging. Rather than disqualifying ageing participants, time allows older skaters to garner respect – a form of temporal capital. His findings also suggest that niche media often take a much more celebratory and positive view of middle-aged skateboarders than mainstream media (O’Connor et al., 2022). Willing and colleagues (2019) looked specifically at skateboarding media content and the ways that older male skaters displayed tiredness, self-mocking humour, and dedication in video parts, and by doing so, they managed to carve out an inclusive space for older skaters. The displayed self-mocking humour, in the form of ridiculed skill level and ability, has been argued to challenge idealised forms of masculinity built around competitiveness, physicality, and dominance (Willing et al., 2019).
While skateboarding can provide a sense of community and mental well-being for aging participants (O’Connor, 2021), it also plays an important role in the lives of former skaters. Thurnell-Read’s (2021) study of remembering VHS skateboarding videos from the 1990s neatly illustrates how no-longer-young people renegotiate the values of youthful resistance in their skateboarding past against the normative ideals and responsibilities of adulthood today. Even though they are no longer actively participating in skateboarding, re-postings of iconic skateboard videos online allowed former skaters to reconnect with their skateboarding youth. These skate videos generated different forms of nostalgia, and reviewing the videos was important for recognising the formative role skateboarding has had in shaping the viewers’ past and present selves. Studies like this illustrate the central role that memory plays in how we understand gender, ageing, and age, and how cultural memory shapes how we conceive of our ageing, gendered selves in relation to surrounding norms of age-appropriate lifestyles (Jacobson, 2024: 31; Thurnell-Read, 2021).
To investigate how skateboarding can be understood as mediated subcultural memory, we build on findings from cinema memory studies. The reason for this choice is, first, the extensive body of work on cinema memory and how this tradition has been successful in defining the cultural and social dimensions of cultural memory through a medium (Biltereyst et al., 2019; Kuhn, 2002; Maltby et al., 2011). Second, apart from cinema memories being an especially powerful social connector among individuals, they can also be perceived as “memories of pleasure” (Treveri Gennari, 2018: 48–49), whereas most existing cultural memory research tends to focus on trauma or political events (see, e.g., Scepanski, 2019).
Cinema memory is understood as socially and culturally embedded in various ways (Kuhn, 2011). Especially relevant to our study of skateboarding as cultural memory is Jackie Stacey’s (1994) distinction between iconic and narrative memory. Studying female film fans in the 1940s, Stacey (1994: 134–136) identified iconic memory as a pure image – an image frozen in time that is idealised or worshipped by her female spectators – and narrative memory as related to cinemagoing as an activity and offering the spectator opportunities to construct a narrative around the self in relation to cultural ideals. Iconic memories are often the result of mediation, a cultural ideal through mediated repetition. Skateboarding has nurtured its own “legendary past” (Bäckström & Blackman, 2022), building on iconic images of how skateboarding was founded in sunny California by (not only male) local surfers, often in empty backyard pools, ditches, and ramps, and later taken to the streets, where urban environments were used for tricks (McDuie-Ra, 2021). This imagery continues to influence the subcultural legacy that skaters draw on as they develop their own versions, including their own heroes and imagery. Narrative memory allows those who remember to connect these iconic memories to their everyday life and to how they define themselves.
Studies of cinema memory reveal the prevalence of place and space and their importance for social identities (Kuhn, 2011: 94). Scholars have confirmed the prominence of places in cinema memories, both imaginary and real (Van de Vijver, 2012). Participants remember going to the cinema at a specific location and as a social event more than specific titles or filmic details, making the cinema not only a physical place but also a social and cultural space, defined by a subject’s meaningful practices (Franzén, 2021: 30). In skateboarding, spaces can be formed around iconic skate spots, often charged with a rich history of tricks being executed and filmed, both by amateurs and professional skaters (McDuie-Ra, 2021). As such, skate videos become what McDuie-Ra (2021:10) has referred to as “slices of time-space”, where time will “determine whether something has aged well; whether it holds up, remains influential; whether it can be remembered” (McDuie-Ra, 2021:35).
In our analysis below, we investigate skateboarding memories by drawing on concepts from cinema memory, particularly iconic memory and the importance of place. We also emphasise the embodied experiences that our research participants have articulated. First, however, we discuss our methodology.
For this article, we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with nine skateboarders, with an average age of 50. The interviews were executed in Swedish; excerpts have been translated to into English by the authors. Four interviews were conducted in person in April 2025, and six online in April, September, and October 2025. The research participants, five men and four women, are all based in Swedish mid-sized or large cities. Participants were recruited through local skateboarding networks, including skateparks and skateboarding events. Additionally, participants were invited to recommend other potential participants who might be interested in joining the study. By contrast with the interviewed men, who started skating in their early teens, the interviewed women all started as adults. The sample reflects the male dominance of early skateboarding and the difficulty of reaching those women who did skate in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. We are aware of the risk of reproducing the typical portrayal of non-male skaters as novices and male skaters as experienced, and we address this by emphasising both similarities and differences across skill levels and genders. Despite these limitations, we believe the small sample still provides important insights into broader perspectives on subculture, ageing, gender, place, memory, and media.
The interviews were inspired by the oral history method, which considers memories to be an active process in the creation of meaning and holds that the past always stands in relation to the present (Abrams, 2010). Questions focused on their skateboarding biographies, including the meanings and practices they ascribe to past and present skateboarding, as well as their media use in relation to skateboarding through time. This way, the narrators not only recall the past but also assert their interpretation of that past (Perks & Thomson, 2006: ix). These interpretations tell us how the present relates to the past, how a participant defines their identity and belonging through memories, how cultural and mediated memories enter personal narratives, and how dominant histories and discourses are (re-)produced (Perks & Thomson, 2006: 3–4).
Four of the interviewed men – Lars, Cab, Frank, and Henrik – began skateboarding during Sweden’s so-called first wave of skateboarding in 1977–1978. They returned to skateboarding in their 40s or 50s, and they often convene to skate pools and ramps at their local skatepark, illustrating the persistence of early adopters within contemporary skateboarding culture. As a teen, Cab, now 61, was able to secure sponsorship from a local skate shop, affording prestige both then and now. Both Lars, 58 years old, and Frank, 55 years old, resumed skateboarding in their early fifties, motivated by the building of a local skatepark and the presence of other “grey” skaters. Henrik, now 59, has been skating intermittently since the 1970s.
Thomas, aged 47, began skateboarding in the early 1990s, a period commonly referred to in Sweden as the second wave of skateboarding. He has participated intermittently for over 35 years and is currently introducing his two young sons to the sport. Thomas primarily identifies as a street skater and seldom engages in pool skating, unlike the older participants.
In contrast to the male participants, all interviewed women began skateboarding as adults. Betty, aged 34, started at 25, initially riding a longboard with her then-boyfriend and friends before transitioning to skateboarding with female peers. Maria, aged 53, began skateboarding three years ago alongside her son, later joined by her daughter. Initially motivated by curiosity, Maria deepened her engagement through the city’s girl-skate community. Annie, the youngest participant at 28, has been skating for one year. Seeking an accessible alternative to surfing or snowboarding, she enrolled in an adult skate course organised by the local skateboard association with a friend. Contrary to her expectations, Annie was among the youngest participants, as most attendees were between 40 and 60 years old. Hanna, aged 46, has been skateboarding for five years. Like Maria, she began skating with her son.
Just like cinema memory, skateboarding memories can be fundamentally characterised as spaces, where social dimensions intersect with places, and where cultural and social practices play out but are also benchmarked against (sub)cultural, often mediated, images. Take the example of Cab, who grew up on the outskirts of the city and experienced finding good skate spots to be not easy. In his youth in the late 1970s, when skateboarding “exploded” in Sweden, skateboarding was intertwined with building ramps with (male) friends and searching for places to skate. Lars stressed the “enormous hype” at the time. In their and their peers’ search for ideal places to skate – imagined as the deserted pools and concrete strips from sunny California they had seen in skateboard magazines – they used to go up the local water tower with binoculars and peer into the distance to look for potential backyard pools:
We were inspired by the USA, but on a very local, simple level. Everything was new; nobody knew how to do it. We dreamt about Vans shoes, blue and red Era’s were the thing back then, everybody wanted those, Tony Alva [legendary US skater] had them, and everybody in the magazines had them. We ordered Vans from the USA. I remember one day I went to school, and the guy I skated with the most had those shoes. When I saw him from a distance, I screamed, “I can’t believe it”, and started running towards him. It turned out he had modified a pair of shoes and painted them to look like Vans. At a distance, they looked like Vans. One dreamt about these things that did not yet exist here; it was the “big dream”.
Since skate culture as portrayed in the magazines did not exist in Sweden at the time, Cab and his friends searched for other ways to connect to the subculture. Lars’s mom sewed him a particular pair of skateboarding trousers that were popular in the magazines: “She sewed them like we thought they looked like in the magazines, it was DIY before ‘DIY’ even existed”. Skateboarder magazine and Swedish Dare Devil became important sources to learn what skateboarding was about. Kidney-shaped pools that could be used for skateboarding become iconic memories through their mediation, but they have little connection to the everyday life of our participants in Sweden, where few people have the luxury of a backyard pool. Cab explained that the weather in Sweden is not particularly pool-friendly, adding another layer to their local experiences. The “greyness” of Swedish weather also stood out in Thomas’s memories of being a skater in a small Swedish town:
It was just one long torment from when it started raining in the fall until the sun came out in the spring. Being a skateboarder in Sweden was boring; we had nowhere to skate. We were going to move to Australia, where there is summer all year round.
In this memory, Australia becomes an icon, a romanticised image conveyed via media in relation to which our participants remember and define their own subcultural belonging. Thomas, Cab, and Lars shared stories of their struggles to find – and later build – their own ramps using whatever resources they had available. During the interview with Lars, he said: “DIY was the norm, we stole wood to build ramps, three timbers could be fitted onto the handlebars of the bike…” These memories of pleasure relate to their subcultural identity in the sense that DIY delinquency becomes a memory of a shared youth that evokes joy among the research participants (McDuie-Ra, 2021: 95). The temporarily built DIY skate spots are remembered as liminal spaces. They were built at the edge of the city with stolen or found materials and were repeatedly vandalised and destroyed by other subcultural youth groups. Thomas reminisces about how that only made him more motivated to skate.
Both Thomas and Cab talked about their early teenage years in terms of “always building things”, articulating skateboarding as a “motion generated by the itch, the need, the compulsion to roll” (McDuie-Ra 2021: 8). As skate videos and filming became more widely available, this “itch” could be captured on tape, though few opportunities to film and edit were available to our participants. Thomas and his friends managed to borrow a camera from school to edit films to produce their own “sponsor-me” tapes, in the hope of receiving sponsorship from local skate shops (Bock, 2019: 142; McDuie-Ra, 2021: 30, 31).
Their narratives are also telling examples of the subculture’s homosociality back then, and here, we also see that media play a role. It was rare to hear about any women skating at the time. Cab, who joined a skateboard team at 13, travelled to other Swedish cities to compete and got in touch with female skateboarders. In his memory, these women were not “as dedicated” as he or the other guys; they were part of the team because they had the right contacts, not because they were good skaters. To become recognised as an authentic skater, you had to perform at a level considered “legit” by the male participants (Pomerantz et al., 2004: 550). Media representation could provide legitimacy, as the quote from Cab below illustrates. Skateboarder, one of the top skateboard magazines at the time, represented women as skaters, where “skater” connoted someone who showed commitment by taking risks:
It had pictures of girls, “Smulan” [“Cookie”] from Stockholm, and what more, I thought “wow, there are girls that do three wheels out” and in Skateboarder magazine there was Laura Thornhill and others, and she that was part of the Dogtown crew, Peggy Oki, who we thought was cool, but she was more like a guy. But that was cool; other than that, it was mainly guys.
The way Cab remembers and idealises women skateboarders aligns with previous studies of media representations of women in “action sports”, which emphasise the need to demonstrate both “physical prowess and a risk-taking attitude” (Thorpe & Olive, 2016: 2). Hence, skating and being “like a guy”, as Cab put it, does not automatically “authorise” female skaters as authentic participants in skateboarding (Abulhawa, 2020: 28–35). Although women have been involved in skateboarding since its earliest waves, the culture’s strong emphasis on risk-taking – combined with many male skaters’ assumptions that women wish to avoid injury – has posed barriers to, as well as spurred on, female skateboarders to carve out space for themselves (Abulhawa, 2020; Beal & Wilson, 2004). Ageing skaters face similar challenges. In the next section, we discuss how the skaters we interviewed manage these spaces and how media play a role in them.
Over the past 50 years, skateboarding has evolved from being forbidden on streets (in the US as well as in Sweden) to municipalities investing millions in building skateparks to enable spontaneous skateboarding (O’Connor, 2024). As a result, more skateparks became available in Sweden, especially since the early 2000s. Cab stopped skating in the early 1980s, but when he saw the new skatepark being built in his hometown – the type he’d always dreamed of – he was spurred to start skating again. At first, he skated in the early mornings when very few people were around. One time, one of the younger skateboard kids told him “there is one more”, meaning there were other older skaters around. This is how he met Lars, and they started skating together, developing the “safe space” they needed to get back to skateboarding as no-longer-young skateboarders.
As outlined by Petrone and Beal (2024), skateboarding organisations promote inclusion in skateboarding by establishing “pockets of exclusivity” at different times in skateparks. This allows demographically similar participants (across gender, age, LGBTQI+) to develop skills and a sense of belonging. This empowers underrepresented groups to move from the “safe space” of hidden spots to the “brave space” of the public skatepark and enables them to navigate power dynamics and practices of inclusion and exclusion (Petrone & Beal, 2024). Here, we find mediation as one of the strategies to carve out space, as Betty described how she uses filming herself:
Filming is… if I’m in a park where there are a lot of people and I’m… not insecure exactly, but you know, where I feel like, “I need to take up space here”, then I think it’s easier to film. Because then it’s as if I have a purpose for it – to try again and do a little better, a little faster. Filming becomes like a reason to take up more space.
The increased inclusivity in skateboarding is woven through our participants’ narratives. For example, Maria found the skating across generations rewarding, emphasising the capacity of skateboarders to practice tricks regardless of skill level, gender, age, or other social markers:
Skateboarding has made it possible to get to know younger, older, and more diverse people that you wouldn’t otherwise meet. In other sports, there can be hierarchies in different ways, but here it is more welcoming. Everyone cheers and helps each other out. For example, I could skate in the park and practise dropping in with a 9-year-old and another adult; everyone can skate, but at their own skill level.
For most of our ageing participants, the “safe” spaces provided by the local skateboard association are key to boosting their confidence to remain active in skateboarding. Thomas, Lars, and Cab got back into skating through the organised skateboarding activities aimed at senior participants. Although Maria got into skating through her children, it was within the safe spaces of “girl skating” events that formed a sense of belonging and engagement in skateboarding (Petrone & Beal, 2024). As we discuss below, social media are indispensable in making these “safe spaces” accessible and sustaining.
Although most of our “grey” skaters emphasised that their presence in the skatepark is key to creating an inclusive environment, some were more critical. For example, Hanna stated how some of the older men in her local skate scene are problematic. They started skating in the 1970s–1980s. They often keep to themselves, show little interest in taking responsibility for other social dynamics in the park, and are quick to “mansplain” to Hanna how she should do tricks. She described an occasion when she tried a trick, and ten older men stood around the bowl, shouting instructions at her that she did not ask for: “The old guys behave the same way here as they do in other parts of society, and why wouldn’t they?” Hanna argued that they hinder other skaters’ progress, as they consider themselves coaches, “insisting that tricks should be done in a certain way, the way they were done back in the 1970s when they were young, and they don’t accept anyone doing it differently”. She further argued that the idea of skateboarding “being open and without rules is a myth” and added that “male beginners rarely get that kind of treatment – only women do”. On a similar note, Betty said part of the problem is that some men think they are better than others because they were part of the scene from the start:
I am like, stop living in the 1980s! Yes, it was very cool back then, but you cannot rely on past achievements. […] There is a certain romanticisation of how things were back then, how cool it was.
Hanna’s and Betty’s narratives offer a contrasting picture of how skateboarding is presented as built on a foundation of intergenerational coexistence, exposing how gender, age, and skill level also intersect in conflicting ways.
The embodied dimension of remembering is often overlooked in studies on (mediated) cultural memory. Remembering the skateboarding subculture offers a unique opportunity to examine these dimensions as bodily experiences change with age, as does remembering what one used to do. Skateboarding is about being creative and adaptive with the skateboard in motion, absorbing the skateboard into the body (Borden, 2001). All our participants embody skateboarding differently today than when they were younger, especially in terms of agility and risk acceptance. As an example, Thomas tries to eat less sweets because, as he put it, he “needs to become lighter to be able to jump higher”. Also, here we see media and mediated images woven into the narratives. As Thomas became more risk-averse with age, the skate media content he consumes changed. He has become more sensitive to seeing other people getting hurt: “[I] can feel it in my own body”. He referred to a memory of him and his friends watching the “slam sections” in skate videos and how much they enjoyed watching failed attempts in which skaters fell in the most gruesome ways. Today, he can’t stand watching “slams” and tends to avoid them completely.
As skating is in popular culture and cultural memory exclusively a hobby for young people, it also carries a social risk for our participants, as becoming “grey” also means doing “aging” in the “wrong” way. Thomas described the criticism he sometimes receives when posting his skateboarding clips on social media, describing it as receiving “different comments” than his kids do, as previously identified by O’Connor and colleagues (2022). Betty received comments from people who “think it’s weird and outdated, like, what are you doing? Bart Simpson skates, but you’re a grown woman, you’re not 15!” This comment draws on the way skateboarding is often read as a childhood hobby or a “lazy pursuit of teenage slacker/stoners”, here considered incompatible with what is expected of a respectable adult woman (Yochim, 2010: 3). Skating is thereby often positioned against a widely mediated cultural understanding of more “age-appropriate” hobbies that signal financial resources and social status. Cab’s non-skating friends are interested in fancy cars, collecting alcohol, and golf, and keep asking: “Are you not going to stop doing that anytime soon. I know, sooner or later, you’ll start playing golf, you just have to injure yourself enough first”. The leisure activities that Cab’s friends consider age-appropriate – and encourage him to pursue – are, like skateboarding, marked by masculine connotations. However, they represent more adult-oriented interests and status.
Combined, these examples indicate how skateboarders operate in a grey space, where greying skaters navigate not only the material aspects of becoming “grey” (reduced bodily capacity, greying hair), but also the liminal and grey aspects of skateboarding as a lifestyle sport and youth culture (O’Connor, 2018). While commentators tend to view “getting old” in skateboarding as a process of “loss” (Willing et al., 2019), the enthusiasm among greying skaters can be read as a “reflection of the greying global population and changes in lifestyle trajectories” (O’Connor, 2018: 926). Again, mediation plays a role as Lars finds comfort in older skaters in California: “Older people on skateboards is nothing strange there, this is how far they have come, and this is how it will be here as well”. Mediated images of the subculture thus play a role in both past and present, including what it is like to become a “grey” skater in California, the “putative homeland” of skateboarding (O’Connor, 2020: 49).
While Thomas dreamed of being sponsored, Cab, 14 years older, entered competitions and secured sponsorship. This enabled Cab to travel around Sweden for skateboarding events at the time, a form of subcultural capital that still affords him status among his skateboarding peers today. During the interview, Lars referred to Cab as the winner of a national competition in 1978, an achievement that elevates him to a somewhat exceptional skater in the local skateboard community. This illustrates how time and having “been there” may confer “respect, recognition and even emulation in the broader skateboarding field” on older skateboarders (O’Connor, 2018: 939). It also shows how skateboarders define their subcultural legacy and how heroes and significant events are inscribed in cultural memory. For the interview, Cab brought several news articles from the 1970s featuring him and his friends at the forefront of Swedish skateboarding. In a similar vein, Thomas referred to skaters who became “someone” after appearing on national television as important figures and representatives of their subculture. In this way, media (VHS, television, newspapers) have a dual role for our participants, communicating the Swedish take on skateboarding and creating and legitimising the local version of what skateboarding was about in the past.
Our research participants represent both newcomers and established skateboarders. Having “been there” from the start – like Lars, Cab, and Thomas – provides access to an origin story that makes it possible to connect to a skateboarding present. When this is lacking, the media help “catch up” and increase the feeling of subcultural belonging. Cab talked about a “gap” in his understanding of skateboarding history. This is because he quit skateboarding in his late teens and got back into it in his early 40s:
Over time, I have built up a library of skateboarding history books. I had a big gap in my understanding of skateboarding since I quit quite early, and I wanted to know what happened in between.
When Cab got back into skateboarding, street skating was big, and tricks were done on curbs, rails, and stairs, not on ramps or pools, as was the case when he started skating (McDuie-Ra 2021: 109). To catch up, he watched skateboarding videos and read books to learn how skateboarding had progressed and become, using skate videos and media as a “cultural memory bank” (D’Orazio 2020: 58) to build knowledge and belonging to the scene (Bock, 2019).
Thomas did not talk about skateboarding history as Cab did. He did talk at length about how important it was for him and his friends to be able to buy proper skateboards – boards that were responsive and possible to do tricks on – and how much it meant to them to ride in new and more challenging ways – that is, downhill and performing tricks in places where it had not been possible before. The release of the film Ban This (Peralta, 1989) was connected to this ambition, which represented not only the early 1990s street skating revolution but also more creative filming techniques (D’Orazio, 2020: 61). According to Thomas, performing “various combinations of no-complies filmed in a cool way, with the cameraman riding in the street and Ray [Barbee] on the sidewalk”, pushed him to get inspiration for his own skating and learn to “see” new skatable spaces (Hölsgens, 2023). As such, Ban This provided insight into how Swedish skateboarding evolved at the time, modelled on cutting-edge Californian street skating, mediated through locally pirated VHS cassettes, and pushed Swedish teenagers to reach new heights in their own street skating.
While the VHS and DVD formats multiplied the audiovisual representation of the skate scene in the 1990s, video content is now mainly distributed via online media platforms (Bock, 2019). In contrast to Thomas’s subcultural memories, Betty said: “I don’t really have those nostalgic memories like, ‘oh wow, this is what we watched on VHS when we were kids, and I know every song in every part’ – I don’t have that”. Instead, she noted that social media is important for her skating, but “more for networking than for pure skateboarding inspiration”. Both Betty and Annie film their skating to track their progress and signal their activity and engagement in the skateboarding community to their friends.
On a similar note, Frank emphasised the social dimension of skateboarding as central to his engagement – being part of a broader community across ages, united by a shared interest. Unlike competitive sports, which never appealed to him, “skateboarding offers a non-competitive form of belonging”, he said. He enjoys documenting his skating, often with ironic self-reflection on his perceived lack of skill, comments he shares on Facebook. He has joined a Facebook group for senior skaters, and he noted that the group’s popularity stems from a shared sense of eccentricity among those who “were crazy enough to start skating”. Like Willing and colleagues (2019), he emphasised that self-mocking humour and dedication to skateboarding are important for carving out a space for the “tired generation” of skaters. His online persona – self-deprecating as a “lousy old guy” – serves both as humour and identity, positioning him as an embodied voice within an online community that operates as a hybrid of fanzine and meeting space (Bock, 2019). The group serves as a basis for communal remembering and meaning-making, for sharing self-produced skate films, pictures of skaters, ramps, and boards from the past (McDuie-Ra, 2021).
It was through these mediated archives that he learned about the Eurocana action sport camps held in the small Swedish town of Rättvik in 1979. In the early 1980s, the camp hosted skate legends such as Rodney Mullen, Stacey Peralta, and Mike McGill, who performed his first McTwist, a 540, on the Eurocana ramp. The camp is currently part of reunions and the documentary Pushing: From Rättvik to California, a film that “follows the history of the 540, from a small town in Sweden to the heart of the skate world” (Thrasher, 2025). As an adult, Frank met people involved in the event and began to understand the impact it had on their lives. He later learned that one of his new skate friends got to know one of the riders from the camp, a young guy called “Rodney”, and they became pen pals and exchanged letters for several years. “It was just recently my friend told me, in passing, that he has a whole pile of letters from Rodney Mullen at home”, Frank said. He continued:
Now that I’ve grasped the scope of this world, that little glimpse really showed how everything connects – how the small meets the big. It gave me a kind of starstruck feeling. Like, wow, I’ve skated with someone who, in a way, has been friends with Mullen. That made me feel a bit more like I was part of something.
Although, as a young skater, Frank was unaware of the formative events that took place in the city of Rättvik, as an adult skater, the connected media ecology has enabled him and his peers to form iconic memories of Swedish skateboarding history, thereby reaffirming their subcultural belonging (McDuie-Ra, 2021: 94).
Taking as our cue that mediated memories play a crucial role in (re)forming (sub)cultural belonging and cultural memory for skateboarders (Thurnell-Read, 2021), in this article we set out to investigate how Swedish ageing male and female skateboarders construct their subcultural past, present, and future through mediation. Especially relevant is that skateboarders view themselves as belonging to a subculture, at a distance from mainstream culture and associated with youth and risk, and with its own niche media (Lombard, 2016). Our informants have different access to a subcultural past, with those who began skateboarding in their youth reflecting on it in ways that are not possible for more recent participants, who started their skateboarding careers as adults.
For both men and women, these negotiations of belonging are mediated. Past–present connections intertwine international and local developments in skateboarding as a subculture, where imagery, heroes, and stories are mediated or connected to iconic memories. A strong example of this is the search for places to skate, how our participants looked for and built their own places to skate. However, these remembered places confirm the homosocial status of the skateboarding subculture in the past, when participation was largely male (as reflected in our sample). In this sense, skateboarding places were also spaces where social and cultural practices intersected, shaping our participants’ cultural belonging. Gradually, over time, we see an increasing narrative of diversity, allowing participants to take up skating as adults. This change was described in highly positive terms by the “veteran” skaters in our sample. Not only have the spaces for skateboarding changed in this way, but so has the importance of (social) media. Our study finds that (social) media help synchronise participation in skateparks and strengthen the sense of community across age and gender barriers (O’Connor, 2018). The formation of “safe spaces” builds the capacity to move into the “brave spaces” of the skatepark and beyond (Petrone & Beal, 2024).
Even if several of the interviewed skaters emphasised the importance of Swedish local and national skateboarding associations being very good at what Betty referred to as “getting all in there”, including both beginners and veterans, their coexistence is not friction-free. As such, Hanna’s and other non-normative skaters’ reflections on experiences of exclusion at their local skatepark provide critical perspectives that can problematise the myth of (Swedish) skateboarding being inclusive regardless of gender, ability, and age (McDuie-Ra, 2021: 100). One way to interpret their critique is to build on Borden’s (2001, in Hölsgens 2023: 390) concept of “the skater’s eye”, which denotes awareness of which tricks have historically been performed at specific skate spots. In our case, the skater’s eye is directed towards coaching and authorising how certain tricks should ideally be executed. Here, the grey skater’s eye comes to represent an evaluative male gaze from the past, surveying tricks to be executed in a certain way, in accordance with “standards of orthodox achievements” (D’Orazio 2020: 63). It is a concept that builds on how senior (male) skaters may connect their past participation in skateboarding culture to the present and, by doing so, use their past skateboarding trajectories to form temporal capital (O’Connor, 2018). For Betty and Hanna, the discomfort of being subjected to such a “grey male gaze” spurred them to articulate contemporary Swedish skateboarding as a culture not disconnected from, but “in correspondence” with, the patriarchal power dynamics of mainstream society (Bäckström & Nairn, 2018; Yochim, 2010). In doing so, they push back against what Abulhawa (2020: 106) described as a longstanding historical tendency to portray skateboarding as possessing an “intrinsic innocence” that can be “excluded from social and political critique”.
Furthermore, the research participants seemed to struggle with societal norms of age-appropriate behaviour, to which skateboarding does not yet fully belong. However, niche media help our participants negotiate their belonging, as they allow them to feel associated with other no-longer-young skaters elsewhere (O’Connor, 2018). Additionally, skateboarding offers a space to temporarily escape the demands and responsibilities of adulthood, regardless of age or gender, and its mediation strengthens this for our participants through niche media (Yochim, 2010). That these niche media help our participants reconnect with skateboarding culture later in life illustrates a complex relationship between skateboarding’s mediations and what is remembered, performed, and known as ways of belonging.
The skateboarding memories discussed show strong similarities with other theories of cultural memory and media, such as cinema memories, in their individual, social, and cultural characteristics. Both cinema and skateboarding memories are pleasurable, centred on spaces, and inherently social, with enjoyment and community created through their practices and remembrance. Furthermore, skaters as filmers become archivers of the many ways skateboarding demonstrates “greyness”, both as a “sport” performed in the grey spaces of the urban backstage and in the ways it encompasses transitions in gendered identities, as participants become grey-haired skaters in what was once a youth sport (McDuie-Ra, 2021; O’Connor, 2018). As McDuie-Ra (2021) pointed out, it is through such mediated collective archives that skateboarding memories are lived. However, skateboarding memories are also very different from those in cinema. More than other forms of cultural memory, skateboarding memories carry many layers of embodiment. These physical experiences remind our participants, like nothing else, how they use their bodies in the past, present, and future, continuously negotiating their engagement with the subculture. Lastly, niche media and self-produced videos are crucial for negotiating one’s belonging, often in relation to more mass or mainstream media-generated images, but always also local, personal, and embodied.