Yahoo Finance Sky Brown: the 14-year-old GB skateboarder and Instagram star who’s been crowned World Champion
If you haven’t said it out loud yet, you’re definitely thinking it. How can Sky Brown possibility have managed that level of talent (and rockstar status) by the age of 14? The Gen Z skateboarder was crowned World Champion last night in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
The teenager was already in the lead after her second run with a score of 89.63 but ended up finishing over four points ahead of Japan’s Kokona Hiraki, telling Sky Sports, “It’s just been really fun. I was trying to enjoy it as much as I could. Landing all three of my runs was an amazing feeling.”
This latest success follows an Olympic bronze medal in Tokyo in 2021.
So, to date she’s Britain’s youngest-ever skateboarding World Champion, she nearly died from an accident three years ago, and she already has a 1.3 million Instagram followers, a published book, her own Barbie doll and a huge Nike sponsorship deal.
Oh, and she’s also a successful dancer (she won reality show Dancing With The Stars: Juniors aged 10) and surfer — her parents actually had to stop her entering the qualifiers for Tokyo in surfing, too.
Clearly, Brown has an ability and confidence far beyond her years (in case you needed reminding: she’s not even started her GCSEs). “I want to inspire girls and boys because I feel at the Olympics everyone is watching me,” she told the Evening Standard in 2021. “I want to be the little girl going the highest, and some girls thinking if she can do it I can do it too.”
So who was Brown’s inspiration and how has she managed such stardom in her tender 14 years? From going viral at the age of four to her BFF little brother, this is everything you need to know about Britain’s youngest Olympic legend.
Runs (and jumps) in the family
OK, Brown hasn’t had the upbringing of your average 14-year-old. She was born (a month before the 2008 Beijing Olympics) in Miyazaki, Japan to a Japanese mother and British father, and has a younger brother called Ocean, 10 (more on him later).
The family are all skateboarders and her preschool had a skate park — a fitting childhood for the girl who became the youngest professional skateboarder in the world at the age of 10.
Today, Brown splits her time between Miyazaki (they have a skating ramp in the back garden) and California, where her father Stu, a marketing exec and amateur skateboarder, lived for several years before moving to Japan.
Their US home is in Oceanside, around 35 miles from San Diego, and Brown attends school in Orange County twice a week and otherwise learning online alongside three hours a day of skateboarding.
Brown’s father introduced her to the sport and she doesn’t have a professional coach (though she’s worked with legendary Tony Hawk and practices with Olympic snowboarder Shaun White). In true Gen Z fashion, she learns her tricks from YouTube, first going viral at the age of four when Stu posted a clip of her on Facebook.
Since then, she’s become the youngest person to compete at the Vans US Open at the age of eight and was snapped up by Nike after turning professional in 2018, becoming the brand’s youngest athlete (Simone Biles and Serena Williams are among the stars she’s appeared in adverts with so far).
In 2019, she became the first female to successfully land a frontside 540 in the X Games, an extreme sports event, rotating one and a half times on her board in mid-air.
Despite she and her brother’s international upbringing, she’s a Brit at heart. In 2019, Brown announced she would be completing for Great Britain rather than Japan, saying she preferred the “more relaxed approach” of the British Skateboarding Association. “I really feel British,” she told the Standard. “Like, I skate British because British people are chilled and I love British food, curry especially.”
A sports star for the social media generation
Brown first went viral at the age of four when her father posted a clip of her on Facebook, and today she’s a fully-fledged social media star. She has 3.6 million subscribers on YouTube and a million on Instagram, a mosaic of in-air action shots, influencer-style endorsements for Nike, GoPro and Billabong, and surfing selfies with her little “bro”, Ocean, who’s referenced in her bio.
“My birthday was a few weeks ago and now I’m in Tokyo for the Olympics. Life is crazy and life is fun,” she wrote next to a series of images from her 13th birthday party, posing in a summer dress and denim jacket while surrounded by friends and balloons.
“Being a GIRL should NEVER be a reason to stop you from doing anything you want to do,” she wrote on International Women’s Day in March 2021, while dozens of posts show her surfing with her brother. “My brother can almost keep up with me,” she captioned a recent sibling shot alongside a winking emoji.
Ocean’s personal Instagram account @oceanbrown is still managed by his mother, but he is already a social media star in his own right, with 177,000 followers and a joint YouTube channel with his sister where they vlog together. She posted a photo with her brother on Valentine’s Day this year and according to insiders, the pocket-sized pair are so close they often still choose to sleep in the same bed.
Brown’s personal page is littered with paid partnerships and brand endorsements from Samsung to GoPro - but most importantly, she makes sport look fun.
“Today I’m excited to show the world how beautiful and creative skateboarding really is,” she posted on Instagram from Tokyo. She told the Standard: “I feel like people don’t really know how cool skateboarding is, and how beautiful it can be and how creative it is because there’s not really any rules. You can add your own style, do a trick. I’m excited to show the world how cool it is.”
Rocking a rocky year
Brown’s background might suggest she grew up with pushy Olympic parents, but if her mother and father had had their way, she wouldn’t have appeared in Tokyo at all.
Their reservations were understandable given their daughter’s rocky year. In June 2020, the teenager was left fighting for her life after falling 15ft from a ramp in training, fracturing her skull, breaking her left arm and wrist and suffering lacerations to her heart and lungs. “Sky had the gnarliest fall she’s ever had and is lucky to be alive,” her father Stu said at the time. “Sky remains positive and strong. The whole medical team is shocked to see her positivity.”
Brown posted a chirpy clip saying “it’s OK to fall sometimes” at the time, saying her plan was to “get back up and push even harder”’. But the accident was clearly serious and could have been a career-ender: when she came around in hospital, she readily admits she neither knew who she was nor her parents, albeit momentarily.
“They didn’t want me to skate anymore,” Brown has told the Standard of her parents’ pleas. “But that’s the thing I love. The skateboard kind of belongs to me so I can’t stop. I begged them so much but they told me to take it easy.”
Clearly, she’s a girl who can make the best of a bad situation. She released a song, ‘Girl’, while recovering from the accident last year, and also published a book called Sky’s The Limit, promising “words of wisdom from a young champion”.
Brown had another fall before her Olympic qualifier, breaking her arm, but still managed to come first while wearing a protective cast. Her performance in Tokyo has been called professional and mature beyond her years, but with a fun side, reflective of her age and the personality her sport requires. Before the Games, the teen reportedly invited her competitors over for a movie night and sleepover.
Surf and turf
Brown is making waves in more sports than one. She gets up at 5am most days to surf (”it makes my cheeks hurt... I can’t stop smiling,” she says of her mornings at the beach) and has been signed by Billabong.
American world champion Carissa Moore called her a surfing “hero”, but her parents put their foot down and stopped her from entering the Olympic qualifiers for surfing, too, fearful of burnout.
She also loves singing and dancing, turning down a skateboarding place at the X Games in 2018 to focus on the US version of Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing With The Stars (the junior edition). She went on to win, obviously, and she was invited to appear on the Ellen DeGeneres show.
Clearly, Brown’s all-rounder status has elevated her celebrity status. Last year Barbie unveiled a one-of-a-kind doll created in Brown’s likeness - part of an initiative to highlight role models for young girls.
The teenager also has a philanthropic side. She’s donated over $20,000 in proceeds to Skateistan, an international charity teaching skateboarding in impoverished areas and has designed a custom board for the organisation, with $10 from every sale going towards supporting children in the programme - yet another impressive accomplishment for a 14-year-old who’s yet to reach the age most of us started our GCSEs.
After her latest victory in the UAE, the real question now is: how high can the teen medalist go next?
