A skater on his board. The Changing Meanings and Landscapes of Sport

Authors

• Päivi Harinen Itä-Suomen yliopisto

Abstract

This article focuses on skate boarding as an example of the changing sport culture of young people particularly. The traditional “national” sports with strict regulations and bordered spaces seem to loose their former attraction, while sports with more free forms of physical expression and non-hierarchical sociality gather young people together especially in the urban space. Skate boarding can be seen as a crystallized example of how young people can join physical exercise and their development as sportsmen with joyful sub-cultural co-existence and non-competition. Streets of cities form a meaningful and open stage for their activities. This free world of urban sports, however, seems to be open for young men in particular, as girls are almost missing from each analysis conducted by researchers of skate boarding.