LET'S ROLL!

Skateboarding’s not just for kids – and this 46-year-old proved it at the Olympics

- JACQUES MYBURGH

IT’S the turf of teenagers: a concrete playground where the young and agile strut their stuff in death-defying stunts.

A skateboarder barrels down the slope, then turns in a graceful arc before gently landing on the lip of the rink. A handful of kids are his spectators today at the skatepark in Germiston, east of Johannesburg, and watch as he performs one daring trick after another.

But there’s one glaring difference between this skateboarder and the rest. Dallas Oberholzer is no teen – he’s 46 and has the salt-and-pepper hair and beard to show for it.

Something else puts him in a league of his own: he can officially call himself an Olympian.

Dallas lives for skateboarding. Other men his age might spend their weekends playing golf or mowing the lawn but for this grey-streaked daredevil, the adrenaline rush that goes with perfecting tricks like the ollie, the nollie and the kickflip is what keeps him going.

He has lost count of how often he’s been told that he’s wasting his time skate boarding, and that it’s a pastime for teenagers. But now he’s had the final word: Dallas has become the first skateboarder from Africa to have taken part in the Olympic Games.

Forget the fact that he finished last – the skateboarding world now knows his name.

“It still feels weird to talk about the Olympic Games. It’s even weirder referring to myself as an Olympian,” he says, chatting to us soon after his return from Tokyo.

For the first time skateboarding was included as an Olympic sport and Dallas was in the line-up of 20 international male participants.