RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Pedro Barros took Brazilian skateboarding back to the podium in Tokyo Olympic Games this Thursday, August 5. The skater from Santa Catarina state won the silver medal in the skate modality park, played at the Ariake Urban Sports Center, and consolidated Brazil as a global skateboard power.
Barros’ victory comes days after Kelvin Hoefler and Rayssa Leal took silver in skateboarding street. This was Brazil’s 16th medal in this Olympics, but the country advanced to the men’s football finals and in two boxing modalities and thus has three more medals guaranteed.
At the age of 26, Pedro Barros celebrated his silver medal with a speech of love, respect, and motivation to the generations of skateboarders who must emerge from the historic feat of Brazilian athletes in Tokyo. “We’ve been fighting for this our entire life, always surrounded by wonderful people who fought a lot to make my life better.
This history of the park, in the Olympics, my history, is just an example for the Brazilian people, who are in our hands. We can make our country a better place through love and respect. We can fall to the ground several times, but the mission is to see a better tomorrow,” he said in an interview with SportTV, thrilled.
Fellow Brazilians Luiz Francisco (3rd in the world ranking), 20 years old, and Pedro Quintas (10th in the ranking 19 years old, finished the dispute in fourth and eighth place, respectively. Australian Keegan Palmer finished in first place and secured gold on skateboard park, and American Cory Juneau completed the podium with bronze.
Pedro’s passion for skateboarding came in his childhood. At just three years old and influenced by his father, André, a skateboarder, Pedro Barros started to do his first tricks. Skateboarding and surfing, very popular in his native Florianópolis (SC), have become his great passions.
The skateboarder began to emerge on the world stage at 14 when he took third place at the X Games in Los Angeles in 2009. In 2013, he celebrated his four-time world champion in the bowl modality and a year later he celebrated another tetra at Red Bull Skate Generation.
Since 2016, when skateboarding was approved to be part of the Olympics, he has accumulated 12 titles, including the World Skateboarding Championship park in Nanjing, China, in 2018, the same year he won the COB (Brazilian Olympic Committee) award for best skater of the year. Pedro Barros is considered by many the successor of Bob Burnquist and Sandro Dias, known as Mineirinho, and occupies fourth place in the world ranking.
Unlike skateboarding street ―a modality in which Brazilians Rayssa Leal and Kelvin Hoefler also won silver medals― which has street elements such as handrails and stairs, the park is a kind of concrete basin. The modality is a derivative of the radical skate format, a movement born in the sixties in the United States when the swimming pools in homes had rounded edges. In this modality, there are not as many push-ups, and there are more chances of falls.
Three Brazilian athletes also represented Brazil in skateboarding park women at the Tokyo Olympics: Dora Varella and Yndiara Asp, who advanced to the final and finished in 7th and 8th place, and Isadora Pacheco, who finished 10th and was out of the final.