Paris Olympics: Andy Macdonald strikes a blow for the old guys with skateboarding extravaganza

PARIS — In Olympic terms, Andy Macdonald has a whole lot more in common with the ancient statues of gods and kings that line the Place de la Concorde than he has with his fellow skateboarders. He’s old, Andy is, old enough to remember music on cassettes, cords on phones, news on paper.

In an unlikely coda to a remarkable career, the 51-year-old Macdonald reached the Olympics this year, more than two decades after he began campaigning to add skateboarding to the Games. He was the last man off the deck in the preliminary heats, and he drew standing ovations every time he dropped into the Parc Urbain bowl.

Spoiler — he didn’t advance to the finals. But like he’s done for so many years, Macdonald did advance the sport of skateboarding as a whole, showing the breadth of a sport that can now encompass both the fearless joy of youth and the wily wisdom of age. Plus, he had a hell of a good time.

“People were like, ‘Are you going for the gold?’” Macdonald said after his run. “I’m like, if they give gold medals for having the most fun, I’ve got it wrapped up.”

His younger colleagues poke fun at Macdonald’s very Dad-like tendencies. Spain’s Danny Leon, age 29, laughed that Macdonald “dresses like an old movie,” sporting ‘80s-style bright colors. Brazil’s Luigi Cini, 22, smiled at the skulls Macdonald still has on his deck — “skulls are kind of, like, old-man stuff.”

But the respect that the old man draws is unmatched. “He’s a legend who I grew up watching skate. It’s a pleasure to be on the same platform as him,” Cini said. “It was so sick to have him here. He’s, like, way older than us, but still doing it at the highest level. It’s really crazy and really inspirational.”

The Olympics weren’t ever on Macdonald’s radar, simply because the Olympics didn’t even exist as an option for skateboarders when he was a kid. Macdonald grew up in Boston but quickly realized that the Massachusetts skateboarding scene wasn’t exactly thriving, so he moved to Southern California. He hooked up with fellow skaters — guys like Tony Hawk, you might have heard of him — and was right there in the middle of it all just as the skateboarding movement was breaking wide.

“Skateboarding is old enough now that it's got this history, and I'm part of it,” he said last week. “I can watch my teenage teammates going for a new trick and chances are I know who invented that trick, or I was there when it was invented, or I invented that trick myself."

At X Games II in 1996, Macdonald won his first gold in Vert. He and Hawk won six straight golds in Skateboarding Vert Doubles from 1997 to 2002. And then, after seeing how skateboarding connected with Gen X, Macdonald and others started wondering how they could get skateboarding into the Olympics. It took nearly 20 years — and they had to fight through a global pandemic once skateboarding did make its debut in Tokyo.

After seeing friends treasure their Olympic experience that year, Macdonald decided to see if there was any way he could qualify. He found a way in via Great Britain — his father was born there — and after obtaining a passport and qualifying in June, the American skateboarding icon rode in the colors of Great Britain.

"It's pretty surreal still. It's been kind of like a whirlwind. Everyone's like, 'Wow, you did it!' It's been kind of non-stop,” he said. “For me, making the Olympics was the medal for me. Even when I made it, I made it by the skin of my teeth. All the stars had to align."

Now he’s in Paris, a city that — strangely enough — already has a small but important spot in skateboarding history. “The last time I was here was 16 years ago, and I was doing a demo with Tony Hawk inside the Grand Palais. There was like 5,000 people in the Grand Palais, and Tony did a 900, which bought the house down, obviously,” Macdonald recalled.

“But that wasn’t even the end of the show, because he grabbed the mic and he was like, ‘And now, everyone watch Lyn-Z Adams do the women’s first ever 540!’ Then she dropped in and did the first ever female 540, right in the Grand Palais. So that’s a little Parisian skateboard history for you.”

Here’s the video of that spectacular day at the Grand Palais:

Surely few of the 5,000 in attendance could have imagined that 16 years later, there’d be Olympic skateboarding just a couple hundred yards away. But the joy and energy of that moment led to this one — skateboarding in the heart of Paris, with many of the world’s most famous landmarks and icons as a backdrop.

“You do a run, and then you skate across the deck and it’s like, ‘Is that the Eiffel Tower? Yep. Is that the Grand Palais? Yep, that too,’” Macdonald said. “It’s a trip being here, where we are.”

Still, Macdonald is not in Paris just to stare at the sights. Yes, just making the team is a massive achievement, but he’s still got pride. The park skate event began with a three-run preliminary, where skateboarders had three attempts to put the best score on the board. Of the 22 skateboarders entered in the event, Macdonald would start in the final position, giving him a chance to assess the whole field with every run.

Warming up alongside the four whirling-limb dervishes in his heat, Macdonald was a little slower, a little more stiff. He looked like nothing so much as the dad at the cookout who decides to show the kids some of his old basketball moves. You think, this could end in brilliance, or this could end in a torn ACL.

As the last of his younger challengers finished their runs, Macdonald rolled up to the edge of the bowl, and the crowd rose up in the first of many standing ovations. “Do it for Gen X!” someone in the audience shouted. (Full disclosure: That someone was this writer.)

Macdonald has a rep as “Mister Consistency,” and he demonstrated that in all three rounds on Wednesday, putting forth a very sensible set of tricks. The judges didn’t exactly reward him — he earned no higher than a 77.66 in his run, drawing boos from the crowd — but he wasn’t bothered.

“I honestly didn’t look at the scores the whole time,” he said afterward. “I wasn’t here for the scores. I was here to be here.”

Macdonald even threw in a little nod to his own past in his second run, executing a perfect nollie heelflip — a move he invented back in the mid-1990s. “I was really nervous about it,” he joked afterward, “because I didn’t want to fall in the Olympics on the trick I invented.”

As he finished his final run, Macdonald popped out of the bowl, flipped, and landed on his board, a spectacular ta-da of a dismount. The crowd and his competitors leaped to their feet in appreciation of how much he’s done, for so long, and he matched their energy with a single primal scream from the deck.

“All the emotions, the long road to get here, the happiness, adrenaline, the excitement,” he said, “it just comes out like, ‘Aaaaahh!’”

Macdonald hopes that his appearance shows just how much fun skateboarding can be at any stage of life. “No matter what age you are, this is the coolest, funnest, most inclusive thing you can do,” he said. “Skateboarding is my fountain of youth.”

As if to prove Macdonald’s point, 56-year-old Tony Hawk himself, in jeans and a black t-shirt, casually skated around in the venue’s back lot behind Macdonald. It was yet more evidence of how quickly skateboarding has become an essential fixture at the Games. In just two Olympics, it’s already gone from curiosity to magnet, and the energy and environment around the deck at Parc Urbain is one of the finest in Paris.

Macdonald laughed that he might take a run at Los Angeles in 2028 — “it’s right up the road from me” — but if this is his last big ride, what a hell of a way to go out.