Ti Gong
With solely a suitcase and a skateboard in hand and a one-way prepare ticket from Massachusetts all away west throughout america to sunny California in 2012, Nora Vasconcellos most likely had no concept that seven years later she can be a worldwide icon of girls’s skateboarding.
She has received many awards, together with the 2017 Vans Park Collection Girls’s World Championship title and has been invited to affix the groups of a number of high manufacturers. Final 12 months, she joined the Swatch Proteam.
Now, after Swatch introduced its inventive partnership with the 2019 Vans Park Collection, the 26-year-old Swatch Proteam pro-rider is rolling her approach via the entire tour within the 2019 Vans Park Collection Girls’s world Professional Tour, which kicks off its first cease in Shanghai this Might and can crown its world champion in Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah, in September.
“I really feel prefer it’s a approach to make the very best of what’s round you,” she stated.
Vasconcellos’ obsession with skateboarding began when she was a teen, watching a cartoon known as “Rocket Energy” that instructed the tales of 4 pals and their each day lives enjoying excessive sports activities.
To observe her ardour skateboarding, Vasconcellos packed her issues, left her hometown on the east coast and moved throughout the nation to California in 2012, the place she began her climb to the highest from a no person to a brilliant rising star on this planet of girls’s skateboarding.
Good at together with the entire eras of skateboarding that she grew up watching, Vasconcellos rides powerfully and gracefully with velocity, model, stream and creativity. She loves carrying a shawl in a contest, one approach to make herself extra female with out it getting in the way in which.
It is difficult to suit into an trade dominated by males.
“Every thing has execs and cons,” she stated.
“The benefit of it’s ladies’s skateboarding might be the very best splash a part of the market. So it’s totally straightforward to be acknowledged.”
However the con, she stated, is that it is onerous to be taken severely as a skateboarder with the bias that ladies ought to go into showbiz or a lot of folks simply don’t consider a girl might love doing it.
However Vasconcellos doesn’t thoughts it in any respect. She rolls, skates, competes and wins. She dominates the skating scene and has turn into a job mannequin extra younger ladies look as much as.
When she got here to the trade seven years in the past, there have been not more than 10 ladies out of 100 skate boarders in a contest.
Now it’s nearly 20.
“The skateboarding group has actually grown, and now we have extra ladies, who’re competing and studying at a younger age,” Vasconcellos stated.
The sphere has opened up and among the forward-looking manufacturers are grabbing the chance with each palms.
Combining its love for sports activities and artwork, Swatch has been the inventive accomplice with the VPS Professional Tour for 2 years, and its Proteam contains rivals in classics such as seashore volleyball, snowboarding and browsing in addition to new sports activities comparable to drone racing.
“It’s a great time to be a feminine skateboarder, as a result of the market is rising, and we’re being very well-received,” she stated.
Final 12 months, she joined an all-girl skateboarding tour, made up of the world’s greatest rivals, who put collectively a tremendous edit — “Please Do not Seize My Boob!” — an over 10-minute video that featured pure skateboarding round yard swimming pools, on the streets and in ditches.
It was Vasconcellos who got here up with the sensational identify for the video, which was impressed by an incident on that journey.
“Earlier than leaping into the screaming pit of teenage boys, just one thought flashed via my thoughts: Please do not seize my boob!” she stated.
“And I have to say, I used to be extraordinarily impressed with the younger males’s habits. My pal and I have been even gently positioned again on the bottom after the gang browsing ceased — no groping concerned. I believe they’re getting it, all these children. Males, too.”
