If you think you’ve been seeing more longboards around town lately, that’s probably because you have.
Some of the people who hold this surf/skateboard hybrid close to their heart said that although longboarding isn’t necessarily anything new, it has garnered a much bigger and very diverse following in Toronto over the past few years. Longboarding, the new skateboarding?
Ryan Rubin owns Longboard Living, a longboard shop and gallery in Kensington Market. He moved to Toronto two years ago and has had a hand boosting the popularity of this sport ever since.
He said that he opened his shop in September 2008 for two main reasons.
The first was that he recognized Toronto’s strong but underground longboarding community.
In September 2008 he attended an annual event called the Board Meeting. It’s an event put on by the city’s longboarding community where riders get together, clad in shirts and ties, and ride through the streets. There were about 10 longboarders at the first meeting nine years ago. When Rubin went that year, there were about 350.
The second thing he noticed was that, although this community existed, only the people in it knew anything about it.
“They were not on the surface,” he said, “and it would be difficult for somebody to enter that community without knowing someone in it.”
When he first come here, Rubin was constantly asked questions about his ride whenever he’d take it out. First, people wanted to know why his skateboard was so long. But second, and more importantly, people were asking him where they could get one.
So he opened Longboard Living so that he could give people a real answer. “And I think it was throughout that two-year period since 2008 that the scene began to grow,” he said.
Michael Brooke is the editor of Concrete Wave, a skateboard magazine that dedicates a good amount of space to longboarding. He said that was part of the first stirrings of a real “scene” in Toronto back in 1997.
“We had 5 people show up at our first meeting,” he laughed. “It was pretty low-key. We rolled around, basically, a parking lot at Wellesley and Yonge.”
He said that the popularity that the sport has gained in Toronto is a little bit different from other cities where it has a large following. “Wherever there’s hills, it tends to take off like wildfire,” he said, adding that people, of course, just love to go down these hills. Places like La Jolla in California, Seattle, Rio de Janeiro and Vancouver were some of the places he listed as having great longboarding scenes.
“In Toronto, it’s kinda like Florida. We have a few hills,” he said laughing, “but just the joy of going from point A to point B really started to make things happen in Toronto.”
Rubin, who uses his longboard is his main mode of transportation, said that the ease and convenience of using a longboard in the city is a main reason as to why so many people have decided to pick one up.
“It is an outlet from driving a car, paying for parking, paying for TTC, just even the fact that you have to be on the TTC,” said Rubin.
He said that he’s never once considered buying a bike, though, adding that his longboard is more convenient because he can take it everywhere with him, even when he’s not riding it.
“Skateboards have always been popular, but the longboard is, what I consider to be, more universal. It has more surface area. It has a wider, longer, wheelbase. The trucks are actually manufactured a little bit different. The wheels are wider, bigger, softer, better for bumps. Essentially it’s just translating into being an ideal way for people to experience the city, get around the city,” he said.
And more people must be noticing it. This year’s Board Meeting attendance went up once again, having brought in about 450 riders.
And both Rubin and Brooke said that retailers are also beginning to take notice.
Rubin said that it wasn’t too long ago when longboards were hidden in the corner of skate shops, but now that the demand has gone up, stores are have brought them out of the shadows.
“The one thing that has kept retailers lights on this year in this horrible recession has been longboarding,” said Brooke, “and the biggest growth right now in skateboarding is longboarding.”
Brooke said that one of the big reasons for it’s popularity is that the longboarding community has a different sensibility than it’s classic skateboard counterpart.
“You don’t have to do a forty-stair ollie,” he said, “you don’t have to be a superstar, you know, like Ryan Scheckler or Tony Hawk. You can just go out and enjoy.”
He also said that more girls adopt longboarding than skateboarding because it doesn’t have that same misogynistic reputation that has plagued skateboarding for years.
Rubin holds weekly longboarding lessons and skate sessions at the shop. He said that he’s seen the diversity that the activity attracts first hand. “We invite little kids who got their first board and we invite 40 year-olds who decided that longboarding was what they wanted to do because they live near the Lakeshore and they wanted to ride a board,” he said.
Whoever’s doing it, though, there’s a whole bunch of them. And it doesn’t look like they’ll be going away any time soon.
