Can the World's Youngest Pro Skateboarder Make the Olympics Cool Again?

The Olympic Games have long been among the world’s premier marketing events, with hundreds of millions of people worldwide tuning in to watch the human drama as athletes from more than 200 nations compete for the gold. Yet this decidedly mass-market broadcast event has been losing younger viewers, who increasingly spend time on social media and online entertainment. So organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics are counting on skateboarding to help bring back millennials as fans, and it may be a 10-year-old girl who steals the show.

With key measures of television audiences down from 2008 levels and interest among the key youth demographic waning—viewership among 18- to 35-year-olds fell at least 25% for the 2016 Rio Games from four years earlier—organizers of the 2020 Games have added skateboarding as a medal event for the first time. Youth-friendly surfing and sport climbing will join the games as well.

“Young people still have an incredible interest in the Olympic Games,” says International Olympic Committee Sports Director Kit McConnell. “But the way they are consuming the Olympic Games—the type of content they are watching and the ways and the platforms on which they are watching—are fundamentally changing.”

Enter Sky Brown, the Anglo-Japanese skateboarder who was named in March to the British Olympic squad. The elementary schooler has already drawn millions of views to internet videos of her fearless, technically advanced skating—an alluring statistic for an event that’s looking to persuade online fans to tune into revenue-earning TV network coverage. “With skateboarding becoming an Olympic sport I think it’s super exciting,” says Brown, who will turn 11 in July. “It’s going to be really cool with people doing super-gnarly tricks, and really fun to watch.”

Part of the challenge is how to present skateboarding and its rule-breaking ethos within the sporting prestige of the centuries-old Olympiad. Take uniforms. While companies have sponsored skate teams in extreme sports competitions such as ESPN’s X-Games, Olympic-style team uniforms haven’t been part of boarding.

“It is what it is,” says Gary Ream, chairman of the World Skate Skateboarding Commission, which is in charge of producing the street and park terrain events at the Tokyo Games. He won’t say what the standards will be for competitors but acknowledges that there will be rules regarding what can be worn. “They will be wearing something showing their team and country,” he says.

The marketing potential of skateboarding hasn’t gone unnoticed by Nike Inc. and Adidas AG, which are looking to capitalize on the sport’s youthful edge and broaden the exposure they’ve gotten by sponsoring the U.S. and U.K. Olympic teams, respectively.

At the Tokyo Games, the Nike and Adidas logos may well predominate at the Aomi Urban Sports Park, a special venue set up for skateboarding and BMX bicycling. Adidas declined to comment, and Nike didn’t respond to emails seeking a response.

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