Per Welinder - Mastering Skateboarding

CHAPTER 1
Equipment and Safety

CHAPTER 2
Building and Maintaining a Board

CHAPTER 3
Balance and Control

CHAPTER 4
Basic Maneuvers

CHAPTER 5
Ollies and Shuvits

CHAPTER 6
Lip Tricks

CHAPTER 7
Grinds and Slides

CHAPTER 8
Vert, Downhill, and Slalom

CHAPTER 9
Challenging Your Environment

CHAPTER 10
Skating Competitively

I started out skateboarding by renting a board from a kid in my neighborhood. He charged about $1.00 a day. This made a pretty good case to convince my mother to buy one for me. I got my first skateboard in 1977: a black plastic Newporter. It had no grip, so I glued sandpaper to the top. The wheels were translucent yellow with loose ball bearings.

The first trick I learned was riding slalom through cones, if you can call that a trick. After that I learned nose wheelies.

I grew up in Sweden and skated with Hazze Lindgren, Fabian Mansson, Fabian Bjornstjerna, Bjorn Konig, and others. Some of my most vivid memories from being a skateboarder in Sweden in the late 70s are from the cold winter days where everything in Stockholm was covered with snow. At the end of the day we would take the train into Stockholm to one of the quieter subway stations. It was deep underground and offered perfectly smooth concrete. The train would come every 20 minutes, so we would have enough time to skate uninterrupted and then take a break as our skate spot erupted into activity. It was so coldbelow freezingwe had to skate in warm jackets, beanies, and mittens.

After years of skating subway stations and outside during the few summer months when it was warm and dry enough to skate, I saved up enough money to travel across the world to California. This was a dream come truethe chance to skate with the best professional skaters in the world.

At first Steve Rocco and his family took good care of me. Stacy Peralta was always there with helpful advice, encouraging words, and a sponsorship offer that eventually led to my spot on the Powell-Peralta team, the Bones Brigade. New opportunities started rolling in and allowed me to earn a living while still skating all day, every day. To this day I am grateful for the generous support of these skateboarding legends. They opened my eyes to something that is important to me: helping and encouraging others in pursuit of their dreams.

Today I do that by running a company called Blitz. Blitz is a brand incubator that helps start-up skateboard and apparel companies grow. We have helped manufacture and distribute some of the best-known skateboard brands in the world. These products are sold in more than 70 countries all around the world. Located in Huntington Beach, Californiathe very epicenter of skateboardingBlitz has a staff of 20 people who are passionate about building brands that have something special to offer skateboarders. I spend my days figuring out ways that skateboarding can keep getting better and more exciting.

My purpose in writing this book is to reach out to skaters and offer advice and encouragement.

Per Welinder

I wasnt sure what to do with my first skateboard. It was plastic, it had a tiny little pointed tail, the trucks didnt turn, and every now and then the bearings would fly out of the wheels and down the street on their own. That skateboard was popular in the neighborhood, and we would pass it around while challenging each other to try new things. It didnt take long for the other kids in the neighborhood to ask their parents for skateboards, and after a while they were all over the place. This was around 1974. Good days.

Eventually I started getting real skateboards in my life. The first ones were enormous, basically flat, and covered with plastic devicesnose guards, rails, tail plates, lappers, and copers. It seemed as if they were almost as heavy as our BMX bikes. Tricks were hard to learn, but skateboarding was fun and that was important to us. Our local skatepark was 5 miles (8 km) away. We would make the trek every weekend day through the 100-plus (38-plus C) degree heat of Las Vegas summers, skate all day, and make the slow haul back to our neighborhood, tired, dehydrated, broke, and chattering about all the tricks we did, tried, and saw.