The Future (of Skateboarding) Is Female
A wave of teenage girl phenoms — led by Rayssa Leal and Chloe Covell — is reshaping competitive skateboarding and pushing the sport’s age-curve sharply downward.
Ahead of next month’s Street League Super Crown Championship in São Paulo, Brazilian fans were treated to an early preview of the season-ending showdown at last weekend’s Pro Tour STU street final in Rio de Janeiro, between local favorite Rayssa Leal and Australian Chloe Covell. As is usually the case, the pair went 1-2 in the scoring — well clear of the rest of the field — and Leal locked up the title at the end by winning the Best Trick competition, highlighted by a backside lipslide and kickflip-to-boardslide combo early in her run.
Though they deny it — “We are not opponents and we will never be, we are a family,” Leal posted in 2023 — Covell and Leal have a rivalry the same way any two great athletes at the top of their sport, chasing the same accolades, do. Both were dominant in Street League all of last season (Leal won the Super Crown), and they currently rank Nos. 1 (Covell) and 2 (Leal) in The Boardr’s global women’s street rankings. All eyes will be on the pair at this year’s SLS championship as well, with all due respect to fellow contenders like Liz Akama and Coco Yoshizawa.
The thing that unites Leal, Covell and the rest of the very best women in skateboarding right now, though, is their youth: None are any older than 17, and Covell — the best on the world contest circuit this year, by a wide margin — turned 15 in February. All are emblematic of a trend that has seen today’s female skaters taking the sport in a new direction through the sheer power of fresh talent.
When we think of skateboarding, we tend to think of youthful rebellion, which goes hand in hand with what is arguably the purest outlet for creativity and unfiltered expression in sports. And it is true that skating is a young person’s game. When Tony Hawk won Thrasher magazine’s first-ever Skater of the Year award in 1990, he was just 22 — and in some ways, the honor was a culmination of what he’d already done in the sport since turning pro at age 14 in 1982.
Before Danny Way won his unprecedented second SOTY in 2004 at age 30, the average winner’s age was 20.8, with nearly half of the awards going to skaters age 20 or younger. That trend has changed in recent decades, however, with the average winner in the 2020s so far checking in at a practically ancient 26.6 years old — roughly 30 percent older than the average from 1990-2003.
You may also notice that Skater of the Year has never gone to a female skater, either. This, plus the increasing age of winners, may indicate how the SOTY — once the most prestigious honor in the sport — may be drifting out of step with where the future of skateboarding is headed.
While the fuzzier criteria of SOTY picks are still rooted in an era where video parts, cultural impact and pure steez outweighed the seeming tryhard aspects of grinding out contest wins,1 something like The Boardr’s world rankings — which quantify performance in worldwide events by giving points for finishes, weighted by how competitive the event was — may better represent the modern, data-focused way we consume sports now. And by that measure, the sport is getting younger — like, a lot younger — in recent years.
In 2013, the first year The Boardr has data, the average member of the Top 5 across all categories — male and female, in street, park and vert/bowl — was 22.0 years old, which was in keeping with the early-era SOTY average as well. But by 2025, that number has dipped to 18.3 years of age, with the vert Top 5s for men and women averaging an absurdly young 16.4 years old this year:
What’s most interesting is that female skaters like Leal and Covell seem to be disproportionately driving this trend. Breaking things down by gender and discipline, male Top 5-ranked skaters went from an average age of 23.7 in 2013 to 20.8 in 2025, with street actually getting older (21.8 to 23.0) and park staying level at 21.0. Contrast that with the best women’s skaters, who have fallen from age 20.2 in 2013 to 15.9 in 2025 overall — including across-the-board declines in average age for street, park and vert.
This is doubly remarkable — and a testament to a major influx of new talent — when we consider that, if the same skaters merely stay in the Top 5 in back-to-back years, the average age of the group would, by definition, go up by 1 year as each skater got older. So the sport is fighting the natural inclination toward inertia and incumbency by actually skewing younger instead of older.
The sheer amount of great young female skaters particularly stands out when we compare the ages for the Top 5 in each discipline by gender. On the street side, for instance, none of the best male skaters are under 22, with living legend Nyjah Huston (No. 3 in the world) checking in at age 30. Meanwhile, Yumeka Oda is the oldest women’s Top 5 street skater… at 19.
Beyond street, leading female park skater Arisa Trew is impossibly good at age 15 — here was her gold medal run at the Olympics last year as a 14-year-old:
And Japan’s Juno Matsuoka, who sits No. 3 in the world vert/bowl rankings, is the youngest of all when it comes to our chart above, at age 14. There is certainly rising young talent on the male side as well, as anyone who knows about 15-year-old Ginwoo Onodera can attest. But the women’s side simply has more of these phenoms, headlined by the Rayssa Leal-Chloe Covell rivalry at the top of the street rankings.
Why is this the case? I have a few theories, not least of which being the fact that more women are encouraged to pursue skateboarding now than ever before — not only by having more role models (recall that, for the longest time, the only female skater anybody might have heard of was Elissa Steamer, as the lone woman featured in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games) and more of a chance to make a living through the contest tours,2 but also by the sport shifting to Instagram as arguably its most dominant medium, where the algorithm has been shown to favor (among other things) pretty girls doing fun or cool things.
This is no criticism; it’s the way the platform works, and it has revolutionized how skaters promote themselves and earn the money and attention they deserve. Besides, for too many years, the culture of skateboarding would actively discourage women from participating. Now, the landscape of the sport has shifted dramatically, and a new generation of younger female stars are taking advantage to dominate their side of the sport — not just in the present moment, but for many years to come in the future.
Filed under: Skateboarding
Both a literal and a metaphorical grind.
According to The Boardr, Covell has made $262,000 USD on contests so far this year alone.