Sport: Skateboarding is no longer "a boys club"

- from Inertia

Pro skateboarder Lizzie Armanto is on the cover of Transworld Skateboarding Magazine. The pages inside are filled with interviews, photos and ads just like any other issue, only this time the magazine is 90% women and girls. 

That is unheard of in a male dominated industry like skateboarding. The girls are shredding. The pictures are seriously rad and the words are inspiring. Barnes & Noble, as well as skate shops everywhere, are selling out of the magazines left and right. Girls are posting about it on every social media outlet and are stoked. Putting a woman on the cover of this publication and focusing the pages inside on the women in this community is the talk of the skateboard world.

For me it was something else entirely. It was a sigh of genuine relief. It was knowing that this day had finally come. Thirty-eight years have passed since I became a professional skateboarder and helped pave the way, along with a small group of other girls in the 70’s. Now it was all coming full circle. It’s been 3 years since I started a website featuring girls skateboarding every single day, just so younger girls would have somewhere to find inspiration by seeing other girls doing what they love. Should it have taken this long for one of the top skateboard magazines to do this? Hell no. But it’s happening now, which is something worth celebrating. We are seeing the change we have always wanted, hoped for and fought hard for. I went to bed last night with the magazine in my hands as I thumbed through the pages and read those interviews again and again. I fell asleep holding it to my chest and woke up in the morning with a huge smile on my face, knowing that women in skateboarding had finally created a significant wave of change.

Skateboarding is not a “boys club” anymore, it’s just skateboarding. This day means more to me than when I was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame. That is how huge this milestone really is. It shows every young girl and young woman out there that we are finally being seen and recognized as skateboarders.

Interestingly enough, it flashed me back to just more than three years ago when I wrote this for my blog “It’s Not About Pretty,” about a image I found in Glamour Magazine Spain:

Image via Glamour Magazine Spain