Teen prodigy wins gold in skateboarding – and she’s Australia’s youngest medallist

Arisa Trew’s bestie summed it up. The run that made the 14-year-old skateboarder Australia’s youngest-ever gold medallist was extraordinary. “Everything was pretty much a banger,” said Finnish-Australian skater Heili Sirvio, 13. “It was like banger, banger, banger.”

A legend of skateboarding – the guy who turned it into a sport, America’s Tony Hawk – expressed a similar view. “She’s leading the way of what’s possible in skateboarding and in women’s skateboarding,” he said. “We’re just lucky to have her.”

Trew was born in 2010, on Hawk’s 42nd birthday. She turned 14 in May. She is the youngest Australian to win a medal, beating the 68-year-old record set by Sandra Morgan, who was 14 and six months when she won a swimming relay with Dawn Fraser in 1956.

“I just couldn’t believe it, when I knew I was the winner of the Olympics and this, like, being my first Olympics – it was just insane,” Trew said. “Like, I thought maybe I could do it and when I did that run I knew I could do it.

“When I saw the score I thought, what, that’s crazy. I got told by a few people that I’m Australia’s youngest-ever gold medallist, which is pretty insane and really cool because that’s who I’m representing. I’m so excited.”

Trew was born in Cairns to a Welsh father and Japanese mother and moved to the Gold Coast when she was two. She took up skating when she was seven. When her dad took her to the skate park, she loved it.

Trew was a hot favourite coming into the women’s park final on Wednesday (AEST). She has won two major competitions this year and was ranked world No.2. In May, she became the first female skater to land Hawk’s famous 900 (2½ rotations) trick.

But she was lacklustre in the preliminaries in Paris. She had three runs to try to make the top eight and crashed in two of them. It was lucky that a few other top skaters also crashed, allowing the score from the one run she landed to get her into sixth position.

The skaters are used to big competitions, but this was of a scale even many adult athletes at these Games have never experienced.

Trew hit the concrete in the first round of the final, too. But she vanquished her nerves, and her second run produced a strong score. She was in contention for silver, but fell to third. A good performance from one of her rivals would have pushed her off the podium.

She needed to do something spectacular in that final run.

Her coach told her to go all out. Leave nothing in the skate bowl.

When asked what he said after the tournament, it was all a bit of a blur. “My coach says a lot of things to me,” she said. “He probably said something like, I’m a ‘skibidi sigma’.” (To translate teen lingo, sigma means ‘top’, and skibidi is a nonsense word.)

She walked to the bowl and defied gravity. Technically speaking, she did a couple of 540 variations, including a McTwist and a body aerial five, “and that’s not something you generally see in one run”, Hawk said.

The crowd gasped plenty at the skaters’ theatrics, but this was the only time they stamped their feet. She scored a whopping 93.18. The gold was hers.

The coaches put her on their shoulders. Her mates, all the Australian teen skateboarders, rushed to embrace her.

At a slightly surreal medal ceremony, French soldiers in formal attire and middle-aged sporting chiefs escorted three teenage girls – silver medallist, Japan’s Cocona Hiraki, 15, and bronze medallist, Briton Sky Brown, 16 – to the podium.

Trew trains at the Gold Coast’s Level Up academy, run by Trev Ward, a former top 10 professional skater from the 2000s who trains BMX riders, skateboarders and scooter riders. They study in the morning and skate in the afternoon.

Ward – who also coaches Sirvio, an Olympic finalist whose Australian citizenship came through about a year after she was chosen to compete for Finland (she may wear green and gold in Los Angeles) – was over the moon about the girls’ success.

“Two-and-a-half years ago, I started an academy,” he told this masthead. “I started the kids. [Trew] was one of them, and so was Heili. We all said we wanted to go to the Olympics. We thought 2028, and here we are in 2024.”

But they were so young. How could he know they’d be so good? “Their determination was insane,” he said. “They looked at the boys and said ‘we can beat them’.”

Skateboarding was introduced at the Tokyo Olympics, where Keegan Palmer won gold for Australia. All Olympic skateboarding gold medal winners are now Australian or Japanese. Palmer skates in the men’s park event heats starting on Wednesday night (AEST).

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