Sky Brown is not your typical nine-year-old.
The freckly Japanese schoolgirl is already the world’s youngest pro skateboarder and, for super-duper kicks, she has just started jumping off the tops of buses.
Sky has been skating since before she could walk and these days travels the world to compete, regularly beating the grown-ups — fueled, she says, by mom’s pancakes.
Photo: AFP
Now she has set her sights on Tokyo 2020, when the sport makes its Olympic bow.
“I’ve thought about the Tokyo Olympics a lot,” Sky said, perched on a ramp built by her parents in a local park and flanked by six-year-old brother Ocean. “I’ll be maybe like 12 or something. I think it will be awesome.”
Born to a Japanese mother and a British father, Sky has no doubts about which country she wants to represent.
“I’d like to skate for Japan at the Tokyo Olympics, because I was born here, all my friends are here and my school’s here,” she said.
She later ripped into a string of jumps, her long sun-bleached hair billowing in her wake.
“I don’t really get scared,” the 1.23m boarder said. “The more you get scared, the more exciting it is.”
Despite her tender years, there is a steely determination to Sky, who is also a professional surfer. The record-breaker landed her first major sponsorship deal at seven and has already perfected several fiendishly difficult tricks that no other women have pulled off.
Her father, Stu, said he initially tried to steer his daredevil daughter away from the sport.
“Before she was three I didn’t want her to get on a skateboard,” he said. “You have a little girl and you want to wrap her in cotton wool, but it was the one toy she kept going back to.”
Her mother, Mieko, confesses to occasional nerves while watching Sky flirt with danger.
“I was sweating a bit when she first jumped off that bus,” she said as her daughter performed the same stunt, plummeting to earth and nailing a textbook landing. “But I trust her. If she says she can do it, I believe her.”
Sky, who is hoping to make her debut this year at the X Games, has faced resistance from various event organizers reluctant to allow her to compete — and potentially embarrass established skaters.
“They can’t keep her out forever,” Stu said, adding that skateboarding’s governing body has decided not to set an Olympic age limit.
“I would like to go to the Olympics while I’m young — I don’t really wanna be 16 or something going to the Olympics,” Sky said, screwing up her nose at the horror of reaching her mid-teens.
“I wanna be young and show every girl that you can do it, just go for it — even though you’re little,” she added.
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