Move over dance mums; meet the new breed of skater dad

The best Luke Covell can manage on a skateboard is a straight line with a bit of a kick. He’s a burly bloke, a former first grade rugby league player who’s not nimble on wheels and would not, by his own admission, land well on concrete.

But there he is at the Olympics, as the coach of a teenage skater who has a shot at becoming Australia’s youngest ever gold medallist.

Chloe Covell and her father Luke when she qualified for Paris.

“Coach” is a strong word. He’s a sporty dad who took his kid Chloe to council skate parks, and then scrambled to learn about skating on social media as her wild talent took her from suburban streets to international competitions to Paris.

“She pretty much knows what she’ll need to do,” he says. “I’m a bag carrier who gets water if she needs it. Who helps her with a few ideas if she’s trying to figure out her run.”

Ruby Trew’s dad is on the same journey. The builder from the Northern Beaches who’d sit around waiting for 5-year-old Ruby at the local park has now found himself hanging out with Covell in the athletes’ village as she prepares for her Olympic debut.

They’re the new breed of skater dads, a twist on the dance mum cliche, who ferry their girls between competitions and learn more than they ever thought possible about smoking (injuring) knees and eating (hitting) concrete.

Skateboarder Ruby Trew and her father-coach James.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

“Me and Luke, we’ve learned all the tricks and the culture and the language [from the] YouTube videos, the TikToks,” says Trew, who took his daughter to her first international competition in America when she was six. “I never expected to have a daughter who’s an Olympian skateboarder.”

If the International Olympic Committee wanted to attract young people to the movement by introducing youth-focused sports at the Tokyo Games, it hit a bullseye with young Australian women when it chose skateboarding.

Nine Australians will skate for gold in Paris, and five are girls. At 20, Olivia Lovelace is the grand old dame of the team. Two – Covell and Arisa Trew (no relation) – are 14. Both strong medal chances. They are breaking new ground in a subculture that’s long been known for its hypermasculinity.

There are no age limits on skateboarding competitions, so several of these girls became international champions when the candles on their birthday cakes had not reached double figures. The youngest athlete in Paris is an 11-year-old female skater, China’s Zheng Haohao, who picked up her first board aged seven.

Ruby Trew with her first skateboard. She competed in her first open-age competition when she was six.

The men on Australia’s team range from 17 to 34. Defending Olympic champion Keegan Palmer, who is a strong chance of defending his title, is 21. The oldest skater is Andy Macdonald, 51, who competes for Britain.

No one can quite explain why pre-pubescent girls are so dominant in skateboarding. There’s echoes of gymnastics, which younger girls with extraordinary flexibility traditionally dominate (in the 1980s, the average age of Olympians was 16).

A popular theory for their dominance in skating is that the timing is right; the traditionally male subculture has opened to women only recently, and these girls were there at the right time.

“They don’t know that traditionally the majority of skaters were men or boys, they’ve grown up with no barriers or boundaries, and people telling them they can do what they want,” says Covell senior.

He concedes a low centre of gravity could help, too. “When you’re younger they know how to fall a lot easier without hurting themselves,” he says.

Trew warms up for one of the Olympic qualifiers earlier this year.Credit: Insidefoto/LightRocket via Getty Images

Luke MacDonald, Skate Australia’s Performance Pathways Manager, says it’s just too early to tell. “There’s just not been enough international competition in existence to be able to really determine what peak age is in the sport,” he says. “At the moment women seem to be younger, as compared to their male counterparts.

“There really need be further investigation as to why that is, and whether there are opportunities to try to prolong the peak age in the sport.”

Lovelace says it’s only people outside skating who comment on athletes’ youthfulness. “I feel in skating age is not really a thing,” she says.

Covell competes on day two of the Olympic Qualifier Series in May in China.Credit: Getty Images

Yet is for the IOC, which deliberately introduced a tranche of youth-focused sports in Tokyo as part of a push to lure younger viewers.

“We did surveying which showed that over 70 per cent of the youth that were engaged with the games saw these new sports as being a highlight,” says Kit McConnell, the Australian Sports Director of the IOC.

He gave the example of Nyjah Huston, a high-profile American skateboarder and Olympics enthusiast who’s bringing his 5 million Instagram followers to the games (Covell – aka chlo_the_flo – has 160,000 followers and Arisa Trew has 109,000, which are not far off the 157,000-strong discipleship of Keegan Palmer, the male skater who won gold in Tokyo.)

Another bonus for the IOC and host countries is that skating, like other youth-focused sports such as climbing and breaking, is cheap to run. There’s no new stadiums or fancy infrastructure required. “The cost and complexity is very low,” says McConnell.

Skaters say the sport’s debut in Tokyo has driven skill and participation to new heights. But Lovelace says it’s not all upside. The Olympics have grown skating’s profile, but perhaps cramped its style.

“[It’s] helped skateboarding bring a new audience … but on the flipside of that, skating has been a thing for decades, it’s going to take time for the skate community to [adjust to having] this big international [event].”

Street skater Lovelace says too much pressure can take away the chief joy of skating, which is the freedom. “A skateboard can take you anywhere, the creativity of it – you try new tricks and learn new things. There’s never-ending possibility.”

Fathers Covell and Trew want their girls to enjoy their sport, and not buckle under the pressure of international competition and medal counts. “We’re not going there to win medals … we don’t want to turn it into something she no longer enjoys,” says Covell.

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