Sky Brown came out of X Games Chiba with gold in park skateboarding, a result that pushed her straight into another busy stretch on the road. The 18-year-old said she had been home for literally one day over the last three months, and the run is not slowing down now.
That gold in Japan adds to a season that has already taken Brown from Bali to Virginia Beach, then to Rome and Sacramento, before she landed in Japan earlier this month. In early June, she won silver at the first LA28 qualifier of the season in Rome, and later in June she was second again at X Games Sacramento. Now she turns to X Games New Orleans this weekend, where she will compete for the championship before heading to Huntington Beach, California, for the US Open surfing competition, for which she said she got a wildcard.
Brown has become one of the most decorated young athletes in action sports, but the medals only tell part of the story. At 13, she represented Great Britain in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and won bronze in women’s park skateboarding, then added another bronze at the Paris Olympic Games. In March, she secured her second skateboarding world championship in São Paulo, Brazil. The latest gold at X Games Chiba is the cleanest proof yet that she can keep stacking results across both sports without losing momentum.
Even so, Brown resists being boxed in by skating and surfing alone. She said she has always used videos on social media to tell a story and inspire people, especially girls, and that growing up with so many eyes on her, she always knew why she was doing it. “Skating and surfing are only one part of my life,” she said. “They’ve never defined who I am.”
That is the contradiction at the center of her rise: Brown keeps winning in the two sports that made her famous, while insisting they are not the whole of her life. Born in Miyazaki, Japan, and raised between Japan, Great Britain and California, she now moves from event to event with almost no pause. X Games New Orleans will show whether the Chiba gold was a peak or just the latest stop in a schedule she has already made look routine.
