The Trick that Opened Endless New Avenues Skater-photographer Jim Cassimus shot the accomplishment, and SkateBoarder Magazine did the rest. The truth is that Alan returned to Florida and, within two weeks, he called Peralta with good news - he had finally pulled a two-foot ollie off a ramp. "I told him, 'Go home and practice, so you can do this trick off a ramp.'" He was doing ollies, and people were impressed," recalls Peralta. "I brought Alan out to California, and he stopped by a practice at the Winchester Skatepark. When Stacy and George Powell founded Powell Peralta, Alan Gelfand was the first to join the company's team, eventually named The Bones Brigade. Somehow, skateboarding worked for him this way." "There was hardly any tail, but he was able to get a small amount of leverage from the board and pop it. "The kid had a little skateboard with the trucks set three inches from the back of the board," adds Stacy Peralta. At Fort Lauderdale, someone came up to him and said. He was on a tour of Florida skateparks for Gordon & Smith. Peralta witnessed the greatest skateboard trick for the first time in 1977. "What is so interesting and ironic about the move is that it was invented by a young kid from Florida and not California, which back in the 1970s was rather profound as California was considered the center of the skateboarding world." "The ollie is, without doubt, the most revolutionary trick of the 20th century." "The ollie is one of the very rare maneuvers in skateboarding that is both a trick and a technique, a technique with many applications," Peralta once said. Therefore, for obvious reasons, the ollie could not have been created without the invention of the kicktail.īut skateboarding legend Stacy Peralta has no doubts about the importance of the ollie in the development of sidewalk surfing. The trick in which the skateboarder kicks the tail of the board and makes it pop into the air is also known as no-hands aerial. It paved the way for more complex maneuvers like the invert aerial, the alley-oop frontside air, the Miller flip, the Elguerial, and many others.īut the truth is that the ollie dominated the skateboarding scene for decades and still represents the essence and the starting point for any newbie skater. Nevertheless, as someone put it, the ollie soon became the single most important cornerstone of modern skateboarding. "I never realized how many people were affected by one little move an 80-pound kid from Hollywood, Florida, did in the under bowl at Skateboard USA way back in 1977," concluded Alan Gelfand.Ī year passed before any other skater could perform the groundbreaking trick. The inventor of the ollie is humble about his contribution, though. In the ollie, the skater performs an aerial without holding onto the board, keeping a harmonious relationship between his or her body, the skateboard, and the ground.Ī Simple Trick for Ollie, a Giant Leap for Skateboarding When he managed to land the maneuver, Alan was genuinely defying the laws of gravity. Gelfand began experimenting with lip slides and then figured out how to achieve a small amount of air when he popped his board during the lipslide maneuver. "And its over-vertical sections of the park played a significant role in the development of the ollie." "Skateboard USA was atypical of the first-generation skateparks," Alan Gelfand reveals in "The Skateboard The Good, the Rad, and the Gnarly An Illustrated History," a book by Marcus Ben. It was coined by his Hollywood skateboarder friend, Scott Goodman.Īnd when Goodman saw Alan accidentally perform an aerial lipslide, he called it an ollie pop. Snyder, a fellow Hollywood skater and photographer, was the first to capture Alan's talent and get his photo published.Īnd how did skateboarding's ultimate trick get its name?Īlan Gelfand had a nickname - Ollie. By that time, his nickname was Little Ripper.Ĭraig B. Its name was Skateboard USA.Īlan was starting to show off his potential, and the local press took notice. That was a time when skateparks were starting to pop all over the United States.Īnd he had just seen one getting built near where he lived. Gelfand started skateboarding in 1974, and a couple of years later, he was already winning the South Florida Skateboard Championships. His family moved to Hollywood, Florida, when he was nine years old. The maneuver was invented by the American skateboarder Alan Gelfand and quickly enabled riders to evolve from horizontal to vertical and aerial performances.Īlan Gelfand was born in New York in 1963. The original ollie is the most important skateboarding trick because it shifted the sport's paradigm from a mainly unidimensional outdoor activity to a multi-axis pastime. The story of the ollie is the story of a trick that changed the sport of skateboarding forever.
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