When LUCY ADAMS stood on a skateboard for the first time, aged 14, she knew she’d found her calling. Now, with the global spotlight set to shine on the sport when it makes its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020, the pioneer of the women’s skate scene is pushing hard to ensure it moves with the times

Words KIERAN YATES

Photography DAVID GOLDMAN

Lucy Adams didn’t skate for three days last week. Now, she’s sitting on the kerb of the car park of Asda in Brighton, reflecting on her loss – in her world, it’s a lifetime. “I’ve been spending the time talking about skating, not doing the skating!” she faux-wails. “Talking about skating” is putting it lightly – she’s the founding member and chair of notfor-profit body Skateboard England, meaning that even when Adams isn’t skating she’s still on a board.

For Adams, skating is a way of life, a lifestyle, the lifeblood that sustains her. From unlikely beginnings – she attended an all-girls’ school in Horsham, West Sussex – Adams has become one of the country’s leading skaters, with signature boards, numerous competition victories to her name, and a legion of fans both in and outside the industry.

In another life, Adams might have been a champion in the pool instead. The story goes that, at 14, Adams was a successful gala swimmer, regularly winning competitions and training at the leisure centre in nearby Crawley. Unfortunately for the swimming world, the pool overlooked the car park, and during every other length she would watch skaters through the window. Eventually, her curiosity became too strong, and Adams decided to defect from water to land – despite the fact that her parents had already paid for her swimming lessons.

“I used to run my swimming costume under the tap and wet my hair so that when my mum picked me up, she thought I’d been swimming,” Adams says. Instead, she became the only girl to join the community of local skaters, harnessing her skills in the park and by watching and re-watching videos of influencers such as US skaters Josh Kalis and Ronnie Bertino.

“Everything became about skating,” she says. “Being at a girls’ school, no one else skateboarded. But for me it started to creep in. My pencil case and textbooks were covered with pictures from skate magazines like Sidewalk – they were works of art. And we bought VHS videos for about £15 from a shop called Streetalk in Redhill [in Surrey]. We watched them all day long – to the point where you couldn’t watch them any more because you’d rewound them so much.”

So, how does a teenage girl with no skating experience infiltrate such a notoriously male-dominated scene? For Adams, it was straightforward: she just did what she wanted. “When I started, it was like, ‘Oh wow, this is exactly what I should be doing.’ I just loved it. I wasn’t that feminine kind of girl, and I didn’t drink or didn’t want to go to parties and chase after boys when I was a teenager, which everyone else was doing, so it really felt like [skating] was for me.

“Yes, there were some guys who did stuff that I didn’t necessarily want to take part in, but I don’t think I ever felt pushed or pressured by anybody to do anything I didn’t want to. They were quite accommodating.”

These days, thanks to Adams’ talent on a board, she’s accustomed to media attention and being interviewed by magazines. Her first real experience of the spotlight came back in 2003, when she was 17, with her unexpected inclusion in a Sunday Times Rich List predicting the multimillionaires of the future. Adams was listed alongside celebrity names such as Keira Knightley, the theory being that women’s skateboarding would, by 2020, have blown up. Because of Adams’ status as the UK’s leading female skater, it was predicted that her earnings would rival those of the legendary Tony Hawk. “Sadly, I’m not worth the 10 million they imagined,” she laughs.

Although skateboarding’s profile has risen with its inclusion in the 2020 Olympics, it is still very much a male domain, and even the most talented female skater is unlikely to earn enough to live on. “The last time we had a UK championship here in 2013, I think the guy won three grand and I won £400,” Adams says, half-laughing, still incredulous. “It’s a joke, isn’t it? On my big cheque, I just drew another zero and had a photo taken with it like that!

“I was talking to [Hawaiian] pro skateboarder Jaime Reyes recently and she said that back in the day [male skaters] were winning thousands of dollars and she’d get just $200. And it’s [still] the same. But one of the things Skateboard England is going to do is campaign for equal prize money. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be equal! Maybe having me as a member [Adams is the only woman on the eight-strong board] has helped, but it seems like a no-brainer – I hope that we’ll see things change soon.”

Adams, now in her early thirties, continues to play a major role in bringing more women into skating. Outside the boardroom, she’s attempting to correct the gender disparity via grassroots practice, using the places she knows best – skateparks – to encourage women and girls to take up the sport. She has helped set up a popular all-female group, the Brighton She Shredders, who rent boards to anyone who wants to practise skating in a welcoming environment.

“A lot of young women tell me it’s a safe space, and that without it they wouldn’t have started and kept on skating,” Adams says. “A friend of mine named Marie, along with a couple of others, has started [sessions aimed at the] LGBTQ community in Seattle, where they do chats about pronouns – it’s brilliant. And there’s a really good project at Projekts [MCR] skatepark in Manchester. They’ve just received funding to go into schools, and they’ve trained girls to lead those sessions. There have also been a whole bunch of girls’ nights at The House Skatepark in Sheffield. And my good friend Charlotte Thomas [a skater and photographer] has just published a book on female skateboarding, titled Concrete Girls. Things are happening.”

Adams was skating in her local park yesterday evening and now she’s feeling it in her legs. Not that it has slowed her down much: it’s 30°C in Brighton and she has already spent the morning on her camo-patterned board at The Level, the seaside city’s famous skatepark. Now, Adams sits on the kerb, dressed in characteristic baby-pink chinos and grey Vans, her white-blonde hair slicked back. Between sips from her water bottle, she talks about how the world – including remote or seemingly uninterested places – is, for her, mapped in skate spots.

“Recently, someone at work was going to [small Wiltshire town] Melksham,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Oh, Melksham has a really good skatepark!’ They were like, ‘Lucy, Melksham doesn’t have anything.’ But no, actually, it has quite a good skatepark – I should know.”

Adams describes the geographical differences in skateboarding with a mix of admiration and frustration. There’s admiration in the way she describes the skaters in LA and Japan who she follows on Instagram, and the ways in which an individual’s style is influenced by their specific surroundings. “You

see some of the top American pro skateboarders coming out of really good park facilities with great transitions and great bowls,” says Adams, “so they have this more flowing style of skating a transition ramp. If you want to go street skating in California, it’s a real challenge, because security is hot on it; all these American pros are heading to Japan and China, because all the access to architecture means they can skate the place. The women there are already skating, honing sharp moves as a result – the street footage online is wicked.”

By contrast, the skater shows her frustration when discussing the scene in her home country, and how it may end up being left behind. Skateboarding’s Olympic debut is a big moment for Adams and all her peers, but also a controversial one. “Within the core community of skateboarding, there seems to be quite a lot of opposition to it being in the Olympics,” says Adams, “because it’s being categorised as a sport, which some people are still resisting. They feel it’s more of an art form and a lifestyle. But in the format it would take in the Olympics, it’s certainly a sport: you will absolutely be able to see winners and losers.”

For Adams, it’s the beginning of a new era; an opportunity for the world to see the excellence she sees daily; a chance for young girls to fall in love with skateboarding like she did. But a lack of government funding may mean there won’t be a Team GB there at all.

“I think we’ve got to be able to see the positives of [the Olympics], and there will be many,” she says. “It’s a global stage that billions of people will be watching. Local governments will see it, and maybe they’ll inject some funding. But at the moment our UK sports funding is led by medal potential, so if you can prove you have that, they’ll invest. We’re saying we need to invest so that we can get up to the calibre of the other nations; we need to produce skateparks that will produce better skateboarders, or we’ll get left behind. Our best medal hope, a guy named Sam [Beckett, from Norfolk, who in 2016 was the first UK skater to win gold at the Summer X Games], is actually based in the States, because he couldn’t live here and be as good as he is.”

Adams herself doesn’t have the luxury of skating full time – she has a day job in marketing for the RSPCA. “It’s like in any sport: if you’re a professional hockey player and you can do it every day, of course you’re going to be better than if you’re doing a nineto-five job and going to play hockey after work,” she says. “Funding helps all that, and I hope that’s what we see next. I’d love to see some of our girls in Team GB one day.”

Despite the scene’s imperfections and the formidable obstacles still waiting to be overcome, Adams’ passion for skateboarding itself is unchanged by her almost two decades of experience. On the contrary, the certainty felt by the 14-year-old teenager in a Horsham skatepark is stronger than ever, pushing her on, leading her to the streets at any available opportunity. “I’m still as much in love with skateboarding as I’ve ever been,” she says, simply. “The most ever, actually.”

Instagram: @lucyadamsskate