Observe reside protection of Day 12 of the 2024 Paris Olympics, with 21 gold medals on provide
PARIS — It’s a Saturday morning on the Staff GB Olympic Home and Andy Macdonald is carrying one of many two fits he owns. That is the brand new one, nevertheless it doesn’t actually match. A bit unfastened within the center, a bit lengthy within the sleeves. There’s additionally the difficulty that, regardless of being 51, Macdonald seems ridiculous in a go well with. That’s not an insult. It’s an abject reality.
“Skate boarders put on fits to weddings and funerals, that’s it,” he says.
Macdonald is in a brand new world, so he’s dressed for the event. As a member of the Nice Britain Olympic Staff, he was given a complete equipment of recent gear and directions. Right here’s what to put on on the opening ceremony. Right here’s what to put on for the closing ceremony. Right here’s a load of official Adidas gear. And right here’s a go well with for formal gatherings. You recognize, in case the king invitations him for tea.
“However I don’t assume the king goes to ask me to tea,” Macdonald says, “so I figured I’d put on the go well with to this press factor.”
Macdonald’s chortle strains are deep, the collateral of a lifetime spent having a great time. The go well with is supposed to be a joke, he says. A nod to all of the illogical strains that wanted to cross to ensure that him to be right here. That he’s the outdated one — born in July 1973 — in a sport typically dominated by youngsters. That he was one of many central figures within the early motion to have skateboarding added as an Olympic sport, and he did so within the early 2000s, earlier than his present Staff GB skate teammates, Sky Brown and Lola Tambling, each 16, had been born. That he’s competing for the English, regardless of being born and raised in america. That he, one of many sport’s true originals, is about to drop into an Olympic park blocks away from the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais.
Macdonald is conscious of his age. He’s requested about it day-after-day. He’s requested to rattle off a protracted, wretched record of brutal accidents. A private wiki web page of damaged this, shattered that. He’s requested about having an 18-year-old son whereas competing with 16 and 17-year-olds.
However then Macdonald flips every part round.
The accidents? In 35 years of skating, he’s damaged an ankle, as soon as, and a patella, as soon as. He’s had his knee scoped as soon as and his ankle scoped. That’s it. “Very fortunate,” he says.
And why ought to he really feel bizarre? He’s not outdated. He’s simply been on the skate park longer than everybody else, is all.
“Have a look at it this manner — I used to be already there when the youngsters confirmed up,” Macdonald says. “I used to be there after they had been determining the place to place their ft on the board. Chances are high, I taught them how one can drop in for the primary time. A number of the first methods that they discovered? I in all probability invented a few of them. Or I used to be there when another person invented them.”
That is Macdonald’s allure. A narrator in a sport steeped in oral historical past, he’s competing in these Olympics as a kind of patron saint. He’ll be there — Wednesday, males’s park prelims, fourth warmth, fifth and closing run. Andrew Macdonald from Nice Britain.
Type of.
Macdonald was born and raised round Boston. He fell into skateboarding early. His first driveway ramp was 1 / 4 pipe, 8 ft extensive, 8 ft excessive. He constructed it with ramp plans ordered from {a magazine} and shortly emerged as a severe skater residing on the incorrect facet of the nation. He moved to San Diego to pursue the approach to life.
Andy Macdonald and Tony Hawk discuss on the Paris Olympic skateboarding venue. The 2 had been key figures within the sport’s bounce to the mainstream. (Garry Jones / Getty Photos)
That’s the place the legend grew. On the similar time “Tony Hawk’s Professional Skater” was hitting the cabinets as a online game that each particular person of a sure age remembers, Macdonald had his personal online game being launched for PlayStation 1. “MTV Sports activities: Skateboarding That includes Andy Macdonald.” The sport seemed an terrible lot like Professional Skater and got here with a musical accompaniment that was extraordinarily 12 months 2000. System of a Down, Cypress Hill, Deftones, Pennywise, Goldfinger.
You won’t keep in mind Macdonald’s model as a result of Hawk’s was comically higher.
“It form of vanished into the ether,” Macdonald says with amusing.
However this was a time when skate boarders had been going mainstream and the X Video games had been bringing motion sports activities into folks’s houses. Macdonald was in the course of all of it. He was concerned in an Olympic skating motion that started round 2003 or 2004, after NBC took over Olympic broadcast rights. He was a founding board member of USA Skateboarding not as a result of he needed to be an Olympian, however as a result of “I simply needed to have some involvement as our sport went in that route.”
The game must wait till Tokyo 2020 earlier than lastly debuting.
Macdonald watched these Video games from afar, seeing a protracted line of associates get their Olympic second, albeit in a setting sapped by the pandemic. After the Video games, he heard story after story about what it felt prefer to be an Olympian. One skater, Amelia Brodka, an American with mother and father from Poland, who competed in Tokyo underneath the Polish flag, recommended Macdonald have a look at his choices.
Because it seems, Rodrick Macdonald, Andy’s father, was born in Luton, England, about 30 miles north of London.
So Macdonald seemed into getting a British passport.
Then he seemed into Paris 2024.
Final July, shortly earlier than his 51st birthday, Macdonald made it via the Olympic Qualifier Collection in Budapest.
“By an act of God,” he says.
“A number of the first methods that they discovered? I in all probability invented a few of them,” Macdonald says of competing in opposition to youngsters within the Olympics. (Barrington Coombs / Getty Photos)
Now he’s right here, able to compete in an occasion in opposition to a discipline led by defending gold medalist Keegan Palmer, a 21-year-old Aussie. The highest American is 17-year-old Gavin Bottger.
Talent-wise, Macdonald stays among the many greatest skaters on the earth. Bodily, issues are a bit totally different.
“They take a slam on cement and are again on their ft,” he says of his teenage rivals. “They stand up and are like, ‘The place are we skating this afternoon!?’ I’m like, ‘Eh, I’m gonna go choose up my youngsters from college. Like, that is it for me skating at the moment.’”
Macdonald has been leaping into the air and touchdown on his ft or his knees since about 1990. He’s prevented main accidents, however not defied time. His physique is 51. Cartilage is calcified. Ankles are worn. Knees are worn. Decrease again is wrenched.
His contemporaries are coaches. Sam Beckett, the British nationwide staff coach, had a protracted profession in vert and park disciplines. He and Macdonald go approach again, primarily as a result of Macdonald was Beckett’s cabin counselor on the annual Woodward Camp close to State Faculty, Pa.
Macdonald, see, is nineteen years older than Beckett.
That’s what occurs whenever you’re a strolling historical past e-book.
“The final time I used to be right here was 16 years in the past, and I used to be doing a demo with Tony Hawk contained in the Grand Palais,” he stated this week. “There was like 5,000 folks within the Grand Palais, and Tony did a 900, which purchased the home down, clearly.
“However that wasn’t even the tip of the present, as a result of he grabbed the mic and he was like, ‘And now, everybody watch Lin-Z Adams do the ladies’s first ever 540!’ Then she dropped in and did the primary ever feminine 540, proper within the Grand Palais. In order that’s a bit Parisian skateboard historical past for you.”
There’s extra approaching Wednesday. Macdonald, who Hawk says is a “prime instance of how a lot self-discipline can repay,” will get a prologue to his personal story.
It’s one all these youthful guys would possibly inform sometime.
(Prime picture of Andy Macdonald practising forward of the Paris Olympics: Garry Jones / Getty Photos)