Skateboarding isn’t the only new sport debuting at the Tokyo Olympics this summer—surfing, sport climbing, karate, and freestyle BMX also have that distinction, while baseball and softball make their return.

Skateboarding is, however, the sport that has raised the most eyebrows as it prepares to introduce itself to the world as an Olympic discipline—on both sides of the spectrum.

Those who go way back in the scene or think it should stay true to its counter-culture roots are distrustful of the effect the Olympics could have on skateboarding, while others aren’t ready to accept skateboarding as a competitive sport (and, by extension, skateboarders as legitimate pro athletes).

But both of those lines of thinking are distorted, USA Skateboarding 2020 Olympic Team members and Tokyo Olympics hopefuls Mariah Duran and Heimana Reynolds said at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) media summit on Friday.

“I’m really excited for skateboarding to finally be a part of the Olympics and really excited for skateboarding to be recognized as a real sport, I guess, and for skateboarders to get the respect for being known as a real athlete instead of a hobby they do on the side—or what delinquent kids do,” Reynolds said with his signature laugh.

Duran agreed.

“The Olympics is going to put skateboarding on a platform to be seen as a sport,” she said.

Park skater Reynolds, 22, now lives and trains in Carlsbad, California—that skateboarding paradise—but he grew up in Honolulu, Oahu’s south shore. His family runs a skate school, clinics and camps—but that doesn’t mean skateboarding is universally accepted as a legitimate sport in Hawaii, or that parents are rushing to enroll their kids in lessons.

“A lot of parents don’t choose skateboarding as the sport they want their child to do,” Reynolds said. Instead, they put them into football or soccer—established sports with known trajectories.

“I think that once skateboarding is in the Olympics and recognized as a real sport, that we are real athletes, skateboarding will just be brought up and known for that,” Reynolds said. “It’s just going to be an awesome way to open the eyes of people who don’t really know much about skateboarding.”

Street skater Duran, 24, hails from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the skate scene is similarly still growing. “I’m my mom’s only daughter; me picking up skateboarding wasn’t the move,” she said with a laugh.

Duran’s older brother Elijah and younger brother Zeke both skate, and though Duran played other sports like softball and basketball, she knew early on skating had her heart. It took her about a year to convince her parents to get her first board, and she spent many years as the only girl at the skate park.

“When I was growing up I was the only girl, and I didn’t think it was weird until people made it weird,” Duran said. After skateboarding makes its Olympic debut with an equal number of men and women—20 each in park and street—it’s very likely future generations of non-male skaters won’t be able to say the same thing.

Encouragement from Elijah and looking up to skaters like Vanessa Torres, Lacey Baker, Marissa Del Sancho and Elissa Steamer kept Duran on her board—which she hopes to ride all the way into the Olympics in July.

“It’s not the sport everybody goes for because you can’t really get scholarships,” Duran said. “Now, being in the Olympics, the conversation for people to start skating will be a little bit easier with parents allowing their kids to do it. There’s a future; it’s a possibility.”

Reynolds also points to the benefit of the Olympics raising skateboarding’s profile to the point that it encourages cities in the U.S. to invest more in skate parks and other infrastructure.

“I’m hoping the cities will push more for building skateparks and building more places for us to practice and stuff like that,” Reynolds said. “Coming from Hawaii, we don’t have the best skate parks, we don’t have the best skate scene. I’m hoping after the Olympics, cities will see this is a respectable sport and we will build more skate parks and better places for people to want to skateboard.”

Because the qualifying event schedule was disrupted by Covid-19, Reynolds and Duran are still in the process of trying to secure their spots on the U.S. Skateboarding Olympic team.

However, they are each currently the highest-ranked American man and woman in park and street, respectively, in the World Skate rankings, which help determine Olympic team bids.

To see a silver lining in the pandemic, Reynolds says not only did the skaters all have an extra year to train (or rest) and dial in new tricks, but for him, it helped him rediscover his love for the sport—and reaffirmed why he’s doing this.

“It kind of forced me to remember why I love skateboarding and remember I don’t just need to skate the park, I don’t need to skate a fricking perfect rail; I can still have fun skating my living room over a coffee table,” Reynolds said, laughing.

And as to the idea that the “integrity” of skate culture is somehow tarnished by its inclusion in the Olympics (which also sounds a whole lot like gatekeeping)?

“It’s all up to the skateboarder themselves where they want to take it,” Duran said. “And that’s the main thing the USA promotes. They’re not pushing anybody; whoever wants it does it.”

Duran likes to use a tree analogy. The roots are the core skating culture—just going out and skating, not doing contests. “But you can always branch out, because it’s such an individual thing,” Duran said. “If you want to do contests, you can do that. If you just want to skate streets or skate a bowl, there’s space for everybody.”

Put another way, skateboarding’s inclusion in the Olympics isn’t limiting anyone who just wants to skate their local park or maybe film with their friends. It’s only expanding the opportunities available for those who want to see if they can make a career out of it—especially non-white non-men.

Because of the Olympics, countries around the world have rapidly built their skate programs; the biggest stars of the sport are boys and girls as young as 11. And they all have their sights set on Tokyo.

“It would help just grow the skate scene across the country, if not the world,” Duran said. “Which is tight.”