Skateboarding is back in the Olympics for its second go-round, starting on July 27 with the men’s street competition. (In street skateboarding, competitors do tricks on stairs, rails, and ledges; the other discipline, park, primarily involves skating through bowls.)
In Tokyo, the sport’s Olympic debut was a smashing success, with hometown hero Yuto Horigome winning men’s street gold in the neighborhood where he grew up, and a trio of teens, Japan’s Momiji Nishiya (13 at the time), Rayssa Leal of Brazil (13), and Funa Nakayama of Japan (16) sweeping the podium in the women’s street event. In a Games with neither fans nor in-stadium electricity, Ariake Urban Sports Park, which hosted skateboarding, somehow became a place to be.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Paris offers plenty of intrigue for skateboarding’s sophomore Olympic campaign. The British team, for example, includes Andy MacDonald, who’s about to turn 51, in men’s park—he’ll be the oldest skateboarder at the Games—and Sky Brown, 16, the wildly popular prodigy who won bronze in park, at 13, in Tokyo, and has fought back from an untimely MCL tear to make it to Paris. Meanwhile American Nyjah Huston, winner of 15 X Games gold medals and the most globally influential skateboarder since Tony Hawk, seeks to avenge his disappointing seventh-place finish in Tokyo in men’s street.
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The Place de la Concorde, the largest public square in Paris, will provide an alluring skateboarding backdrop in the heart of the city. Women’s street takes place on July 28, the day after men’s, while women’s park is on Aug. 6 and men’s park is on Aug. 7.
While TIME would typically be more than happy to provide further analysis of the competitions and contenders, we figured we’d offer something more practical. As you watch the Olympic event with your non-skateboarding pals, or just pass by a bunch of kids scraping rails on their boards in your neighborhood, you need to know how to sound cool. Or, to put it more pointedly, how to sound gnarly.
So with the help of some Paris-bound skateboarders from the U.S. squad, here’s your guide to talk like an Olympic skateboarder. Commit these terms to memory, you square. There’ll be a test this summer.
Gnarly. Awesome.
Sick. See above.
Rad. Ditto.
These three core words sort of form the basis of skaterspeak and are pretty much synonymous with awesome, exciting, dangerous. Even a crash landing can be pretty damn gnarly—as long as the skateboarder walks away unscathed, as they often do. They get used to falling.
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“To be honest with you, they all mean the same thing,” says Jagger Eaton, 23, who won a bronze medal in the street event in Tokyo and hopes to ascend higher on the podium in Paris. “If there’s a cool trick, I’ll say it’s rad one day. If it’s another day that ends in y, I’ll say, ‘Oh, that was sick.’ And then another day that ends in y, I’ll say, ‘Oh, that was gnarly.’”
Bodied. Having taken a fall.
Buckled. Having taken a fall, but gotten hurt. In other words, a worse degree of bodied.
“If you’re taking a bad fall, you either got bodied, or you got buckled,” says Huston. “If you got buckled, you got hurt. So you don’t want to get buckled.”
Sailing. Flying high in the air on your skateboard.
“If someone’s got a lot of hang time, you call that sailing,” says Huston, 29. He points to U.S. Olympic teammate Chris Joslin, another street competitor, as someone who soars. “Chris Joslin is the perfect example of a sailer,” says Huston. Or is it sailor?
Let’s declare either acceptable. Sound rad?
Send. To just lay it all out on the line. To take a healthy risk with your trick.
As Huston explains: “Big send. That is someone who is just willing to go for it, man. I’m a sender. I go out there and go for it.”
Sketchy. If you land a maneuver, but not how you intended to do so, that’s quite sketch. “Sometimes when you do a trick and you kind of wobble, or a foot falls off a little, people will say, ‘Oh, that was sketchy,’” says Paige Heyn, 16, a women’s street competitor. Heyn, who hails from Tempe, Ariz., is the second youngest American Olympian: only gymnast Hezly Rivera, also 16 but born a few months after Heyn, is younger.
Back Me Up. Match my accomplishments. “So you’re skating with your friend, and they’re like, ‘OK, I’m going to land something, you gotta back me up,’” says park skater Minna Stess. “It’s a little motivation thing. ‘Oh, if I land this, you gotta land your trick.’”
Steezy. “Have people said steezy?” asks Stess, 18, when I ask for more skateboarding terms. No, I tell her; please explain.
“When someone did a trick and it looked good, it’s like, ‘That’s steezy,’” she says. Sounds like a skateboarder SAT word for gnarly/sick/rad.
Call Stess the team linguistics professor.
Bus. “I was trying to explain this to my friend’s mom, but the way I was explaining it was kind of, it was hard to explain without her coming from a background of skating,” says Poe Pinson, a street skater from Fernandina Beach, Fla., north of Jacksonville, who’ll make her Olympic debut in Paris.
Let’s give it a try. “Bus, like, bussed up. ‘Oh, wow. You landed that, bus up, uuuuuup.’ It’s like an Instagram meme thing.”
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Come again? “If you land a trick all crazy—this is how I was explaining it to my friend’s mom,” says Pinson. “I was like, ‘Oh yeah, if you do a back tail, but your heel kind of clips, and then you come out all crazy with your weight super far forward, and you kind of get jerked forward, you get bussed.’”
So it’s landing a trick in an unorthodox way? “Yeah,” says Pinson, 19. “If you land a trick, all twisted up, or you’re super, like, wuuuup. If you land straight and it just like rocks you a little bit, just like, wuuuup. Or if you hit a crack—I have a video of one of my friends, she doesn’t really skate, but she kind of hit a crack and sort of got thrown, but was somehow super unfazed. It was a crazy video.”
Got that? The real lesson here: if you want to sound like an Olympic skateboarder, talk like Poe Pinson. You’ll be just fine.
