PARIS, France — The skateboarding competitions at the 2024 Paris Olympics feature some of youngest Olympic athletes ever.
Chinese park skateboarder Zheng Haohao is 11 years and 11 months.
World No. 1 street skateboarder Coco Yoshizaw is 14 years old. Brazilian phenom and Tokyo silver street skateboarding medalist Rayssa Leal is 16.
Women's street skateboarder and Tokyo bronze medalist Funa Nakayama is now 19.
Momiji Nishiya, who won the sport’s first-ever Olympic gold medal in Tokyo at 13 years old, failed to qualify this year.
In 2024, skateboarding competitions include women's street, women's park, men's street and men's park.
Is there a minimum age at the Olympics?
For what it’s worth, there’s no universal minimum age to compete in the Olympics, but each sport’s international regulatory body can set their own.
There’s no minimum age to compete in surfing or skateboarding events, whereas Olympic gymnasts must be at least 16 years old and boxers must be 18 (fun fact: this is the only sport with a maximum age limit, which caps competitors at 40 years old).
As for why skateboarders are so young, one theory is that once you reach a certain age, the fear of injury can make it harder to compete at a high level, or to keep pushing boundaries and learning new skills.
“Anyone who has stepped on a skateboard has fallen off, and there’s a good saying, it doesn’t matter how rich you are, you can’t buy a trick, you have to pay with pain,” BBC skateboarding commentator Ed Leigh said. “That’s the only way around it. That’s something shared between all skateboarders. A camaraderie. You know to get that good you’ve overcome some big slams and stayed committed to it.”
Leigh said that skateboarders typically start young, when their bodies can recover more quickly from the bad falls that are inevitable when you start learning a skill (think about learning to ski as an adult versus as a child).
“We’re going through this huge bell curve of adoption, but now we’ve got the younger generation coming through, we’ll see them stay for longer,” Leigh told INEWS in the U.K. “A good person to compare to is Shaun White, who competed at 13 and then at 35 he’s retiring half-pipers and is still at the top of his game.”
For what it’s worth, the oldest competitor in the Paris Olympics is 69-year-old Mary Hanna, an equestrian from Australia who has now been to every Olympic Games since 1996, except for Beijing in 2008.
