Friends and shithead commenters, I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite degenerate scribes, David Carnie.

Self-portrait by Dave Carnie

Friends and shithead commenters, I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite degenerate scribes, David Carnie. Dave is a writer who, along with Chris Nieratko, first got his chops at the awesome yet now-defunct Big Brother skateboard magazine, which was famously “the most subversive thing a person could buy at a grocery store” (for all its girly pics, bomb recipes, and suicide how-to’s) before it folded in 2004. Thereafter Dave operated as a crucial member of the Jackass World phenomenon until recently. This 39 year old Charles Manson-looking hobgoblin presently works as a staff writer at the Skateboard Mag. He additionally helps out a dude called Ryan Stutt to breathe life into skateboard site extraordinaire King Shit, with whom we here at Street Carnage have proudly cross-posted the following rant by Dave Carnie about roller-skaters, skateboarding’s international governing body, and why these two vastly divergent groups are duking it out for control at the Olympics.

-Peter Madsen

———-

I went out to Boston for the Dew Tour “International Skateboard Federation World Championships.” You’ve never heard of the ISF? Skateboard World Championships? What the fuck? Yeah, it was a Dew Tour contest, but it was also an International Skateboard World Championship. Even though I’m a member of the ISF and an executive board director for USA Skateboarding (USAS—or “Us Ass,” as I like to call it), the “Skateboarding World Championships” has a peculiar ring to it. But I helped make it happen and I’m a member of what will become skateboarding’s international governing body. I like to kid that I’m not really sure how it happened—because, on the surface, I don’t really fit in with the group we’ve assembled (as Mark Waters said, “You couldn’t get further apart on the skateboard spectrum than Dave Carnie and Andy MacDonald”)—but I had a small part in getting the whole thing started.

The short version of the story is: skateboarding is going to be in the Olympics whether we like it or not. I don’t like it. But NBC and the IOC (International Olympic Committee) want it. And they’ll get it one way or another. If it isn’t done by skateboarders, it will be done by one of the handful of other groups that are out there trying to claim they are the “the official governing body of skateboarding.” Most notably, a group called Rollersports. They are an international group of rollerskaters, called FIRS (Federation Internationale de Rollersports) who are recognized as the governing body of rollerskating. Unfortunately for them, rollerskating is not yet an Olympic sport. Probably because no one rollerskates anymore unless it’s Halloween (“Roller girl!”), or there’s a 70’s theme party going on?

A few years ago Rollersports realized that rollerskating’s numbers were on the decline, so they decided to rebrand themselves by changing their name to “Rollersports,” and thus claiming jurisdiction over anything that was a sport on wheels. Namely, skateboarding. They saw the popularity of skateboarding, and they no doubt saw dollar signs, so they wanted a piece of our pie. And already being an internationally recognized sports federation, they were in a good position to take control of skateboarding and receive the money that helps to fund the growth of any new sport.

When this all started, I interviewed their spokeswoman, Dinah Robbins, at their US offices which are located in Nebraska. She readily admitted that there is no one in their organization that skateboards, but they were the group that would be the governing body of skateboarding. She tried to persuade me that they only want what’s best for skateboarding. I made the rather bold suggestion that wouldn’t the best thing for skateboarding be that it’s run by actual skateboarders? She said that skateboards have wheels that roll, so technically it’s a rollersport, and thus fell within their jurisdiction. Figure skaters wear ice skates and skate on ice, but that doesn’t mean they should be making decisions for hockey, does it?

I brought this issue to the skateboard community’s attention and suggested we should probably all join forces and create a governing body. World Cup, IASC, etc., I said, “Let’s all get together.” Around the same time, the head of NBC contacted Gary Ream, President of Woodward Skateboard Camps, about getting skateboarding organized and ready to enter the Olympics. Snowboarding was a huge success for the Winter Olympics, but the IOC went about it all wrong and it was actually a huge mess. Snowboarding went into the Olympics under the International Ski Federation. Despite the similarities between the two disciplines, they couldn’t be more different. And so skiing fucked up snowboarding. While the IOC and NBC really, really want skateboarding in the Olympics, they’ve come to realize that they don’t want to make the same mistake they did with snowboarding. They want to make sure that skateboarding is governed and run by actual representatives from the sport. Thus the birth of the International Skateboard Federation.

The group consists of a lot of the big names and instrumental players in the skateboard industry, from Tony Hawk and Chris Miller, to Mark Waters and Tod Swank, Don Bostick, Jim Fitzpatrick, etc.. (You can see the list of members and get more information at www.usaskateboarding.org, and www.internationalskateboardingfederation.com.) In short, skateboarders and the skateboard industry will be chairing the governing body of skateboarding. We are not the official governing body yet, however. There are a number of steps required in the application process, and one of the last ones was having a world championships. That’s what that whole contest in Boston was about. And now that we’ve checked that off, it won’t be long before we are the ultimate rulers of world of skateboarding. RULERS! You will do what we say!

I kid, of course. But the whole point of becoming the governing body of skateboarding was so that we can remain ungoverned. And if any big decisions befall skateboarding, like the Olympics, they will be made by skateboarders. Because if Rollersports got a hold of skateboarding, there’s no telling what they’d do with it. As you can see from this little tidbit from their website, they totally get skateboarding (sarcasm).

“This is a show of the emerging roller disciplines which are day by day reaching the same importance of the ‘historical’ official roller disciplines. Much appreciated by young people, these sports are stylish, aggressive, acrobatic, in a word: modern sports for young people.”

Thank you Rollersports for your interest in our stylishly aggressive acrobatic roller discipline, but we’ll take it from here.

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