'The girls are going off:' Women skateboarders lead the way at X Games

Women’s skateboarding is growing so viral that Ruby Lilley sometimes feels a little aged.

Still waiting for her 17^th birthday, the girl from Oceanside sat atop a picnic table with glitter under her eyes before a skateboard demonstration. During the X Games finals at the Ventura County Fairgrounds on Saturday, she’ll fly through a 13-foot, 9-inch ramp in the first women’s vert finals in 13 years. She’ll be competing against athletes, including Reese Nelson of Canada, a rising star mentored by Tony Hawk, and Arisa Trew, the Australian who was the first female to complete a 720 off the vert, turning two full rotations in midair.

Nelson is 10. Trew is 13.

“I feel old, and I’m 16,” Lilley said, wearing a cap for one of her sponsors, Monster Energy drink. “Some of these girls are almost half my age... 16 is the new 20.”

The evolution of Lilley’s sport will be on full display this weekend. Eight of the world’s best women athletes, including Olympians and champions from across the globe, will compete Saturday at 4 p.m. in a vert event pulled after the 2010 finals because X Games leaders said it hadn’t progressed enough. The next day, skaters will glide, clatter and hurdle across handrails and over stairways in a first-ever best street skate trick event for women at the X Games finals.

“The girls are going off,” said Cara-Beth Burnside, former women’s vert champ. “There are so many good girls now, and they’re skating everything.”

Nearly 20 years ago, Burnside led X Games women athletes on a boycott in protest of the $2,000 she said was being paid to women winners, compared to $50,000 for the men. It worked. Winnings rose.

Back then, a handful of women skateboarders dominated the vert. Now, the talent pool is deep, young and international with street skaters like Rayssa Leal of Brazil who was doing heel flips over stairways at age 8 and German aerobat Lilly Stoephasius, rumored to be on the verge of a competition 720.

The vert has again become "sick." Much of the credit goes to Hawk who has championed the event, bringing the women’s vert into his own Vert Alert event that now serves as a qualifier for the X Games finals.

The vert features a steep, almost wall-like ramp or half pipe that launches athletes into the air where they perform kicks and spins with names like McTwists and Madonnas. They rattle on the front of their board across the ramp, grabbing the tail, in a "nosepick."

More: Everything you need to know about the X Games in Ventura

“I think it should be an Olympic sport,” Burnside said of the vert. “The skating is unreal to watch.”

Brian Kerr, director of sports and competition for the X Games, said the vert was eliminated in 2011 because less women were doing it, and the event seemed to be growing stagnant. Now, tournaments like Hawk’s have attracted more athletes.

“These young women are going above and beyond,” he said. “There’s a lot of talent and the momentum is building.”

Lilley has her own take.

"Vert is so much bigger and scarier," she said, comparing it to other skateboard events. She remembered watching girls at a skateboard park launching themselves up a ramp when she was 12. She had to try it.

“I didn’t even know girls could skate vert,” she said.

The event and the sport are exploding because older girls inspire the younger ones in a cycle that keeps repeating, Lilley said.

You 'might as well keep going'

On Tuesday, Lilley and her friend and fellow vert skateboarder Bryce Wettstein sat with microphones in front of 200 summer sports camp students. Lilley told the kids she was a ballet and ballroom dancer who started skateboarding because that’s what her brothers did.

“I always did what they did,” she said.

Wettstein told the kids she started boarding in empty swimming pools with her parents at about the age of 6. Now, she’s an Olympian who competed in the 2020 games. On Tuesday, she wore knee-high socks, old-school Converse sneakers and played her ukulele for the campers, also handing out tiny paper butterflies as gifts.

She described skateboarding as sort of a gate that opens up avenues to other things – music, art and inspiration. She said performing a skateboard trick was like climbing a single step only to realize that you are on a stairway and "might as well keep going."

The athletes taught the campers how to skateboard, holding the kids' hands as they glided across pavement. They told the kids about the sport’s risks – “I got a concussion so hard I threw up and couldn’t see,” Lilley said. They also talked about realizing they can reach goals that seem impossible.

Some of the campers had questions. Narvine Kaur, who is 9, told a reporter she had doubts about the career potential of skateboarding.

“Are you going to get money or is it just for fun?” she asked.

Citlali Campos, who is 10, already skateboards. Lilley showed her how to do a simple kick and now Citlali is thinking about her own future in the X Games.

“Yeah, yeah!” she said, gesturing at the skateboarders and the message they delivered to all the campers. “They say you can be amazing.”

For more information on the X Games, go to https://tinyurl.com/mtedmybr.

Tom Kisken covers health care and other news for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tom.kisken@vcstar.com or 805-437-0255.

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This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Women skateboarders narrow the gap at Ventura's X Games