Long Live Sport: Stay at Home Content Week Six — The intersection of Sport and Technology: A look at skateboarding for inspiration.
As we enter another week with the vast majority of sport still closed off and without a named date on which it will return, we’ve taken a slightly different tact. The sporting world is in a position quite unlike anything else in recent memory.
New situations create unusual contexts, and with all the disclaimers and admissions of what is most important during a global pandemic, unusual contexts also often create opportunities. Not only in the business sense, but in being able to think in new or non traditional ways. Being able to reframe problems from an alternative perspective is often what creates innovative solutions. With the importance of adopting a positive mindset during this difficult period, this week we highlight someone famous for his non traditional mindset.
Rodney Mullen
Rodney Mullen is perhaps an unlikely figure to become a recognised thought leader in the world of technology. One of the most successful and influential skateboarders to have ever picked up a board, Mullen in his appearance, demeanour and mannerisms encapsulates the spirit of a sport that has traditionally been on the fringes of mainstream recognition. Ask someone to draw what a skateboarder looks like, and something close to Mullen is the likely outcome.
For all the well-funded and polished professional competitions, esports and video production that has grown around skateboarding, many still associate it simply with anti-social behaviour. Many tricks in street skating for example are reliant on staircases, handrails and other parts of a public built environment, for which it’s become part of skateboarding folklore for skaters to regale the number of times they’ve been escorted by security guards from a particular location.
But it is exactly this type of disruption to expectations and conventional wisdom that Mullen has tapped into, in being able to translate the creativity required to be a successful skateboarder to the innovation required to succeed in Silicon Valley. Recognised as having created tens of iconic moves that have become staples in skateboarding across all levels, Mullen’s career demonstrates an objectively pure form of creativity. Taking what is essentially a plank of wood on wheels and creating something that no one has ever done before is impressive.
But it’s not only innovation on which Mullen speaks to a technology audience with confidence however. As he’s gotten older and picked up new interests, he identified striking similarities between the origins of skateboarding and technology. Both are considered to have been started and grown into what they have become today by people considered ‘outsiders’.
Mullen picked up skating as a sport he could practice alone, and eventually compete without an overbearing coach or the strict rules and guidelines that contain most other sports. Comparably, many of today’s largest tech companies were once just an idea grown in someone’s garage. In particular, Mullen identifies the open source community as being synonymous with what has occurred in the evolution of skateboarding. Taking something someone has already created, improving it or using it in a slightly different way and then sharing it with the community again.
“The biggest obstacle to creativity is breaking through the barrier of disbelief.”
Similarly, he points to how software developers or hackers approach their work and finds common ground in the value of creativity. Taking existing materials or content and either applying them to new contexts or in previously unlikely combinations to open up new possibilities and solutions. Discussing this point, Mullen has a firm belief that “The biggest obstacle to creativity is breaking through the barrier of disbelief.” Many things have been considered impossible, until someone went ahead and did it.
Perhaps most poignantly for the current sporting situation, Mullen has discussed in great depth that most people will only ever see the highlights from skateboarding — all the moves landed, no one injured, everything looking smooth and easy. But behind each of those landed moves is all the times that skateboarder has fallen trying to perfect it. Mullen argues it is this journey, and how skateboarders respond to all those falls that actually define them rather than the polished highlights.
Sport may have fallen temporarily, but it will be measured by how it gets up.
