Follow live coverage of Day 12 of the 2024 Paris Olympics, with 21 gold medals on offer
PARIS — It’s a Saturday morning at the Team GB Olympic House and Andy Macdonald is wearing one of the two suits he owns. This is the new one, but it doesn’t really fit. A little loose in the middle, a little long in the sleeves. There’s also the issue that, despite being 51, Macdonald looks ridiculous in a suit. That’s not an insult. It’s an abject truth.
“Skateboarders wear suits to weddings and funerals, that’s it,” he says.
Macdonald is in a new world, so he’s dressed for the occasion. As a member of the Great Britain Olympic Team, he was given an entire kit of new gear and instructions. Here’s what to wear at the opening ceremony. Here’s what to wear for the closing ceremony. Here’s a load of official Adidas gear. And here’s a suit for formal gatherings. You know, in case the king invites him for tea.
“But I don’t think the king is going to invite me to tea,” Macdonald says, “so I figured I’d wear the suit to this press thing.”
Macdonald’s laugh lines are deep, the collateral of a lifetime spent having a good time. The suit is meant to be a joke, he says. A nod to all the illogical lines that needed to cross in order for him to be here. That he’s the old one — born in July 1973 — in a sport often dominated by teenagers. That he was one of the central figures in the early movement to have skateboarding added as an Olympic sport, and he did so in the early 2000s, before his current Team GB skate teammates, Sky Brown and Lola Tambling, both 16, were born. That he’s competing for the English, despite being born and raised in the United States. That he, one of the sport’s true originals, is about to drop into an Olympic park blocks away from the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais.
Macdonald is aware of his age. He’s asked about it every day. He’s asked to rattle off a long, wretched list of brutal injuries. A personal wiki page of broken this, shattered that. He’s asked about having an 18-year-old son while competing with 16 and 17-year-olds.
But then Macdonald flips everything around.
The injuries? In 35 years of skating, he’s broken an ankle, once, and a patella, once. He’s had his knee scoped once and his ankle scoped. That’s it. “Very lucky,” he says.
And why should he feel weird? He’s not old. He’s just been at the skate park longer than everyone else, is all.
“Look at it this way — I was already there when the teenagers showed up,” Macdonald says. “I was there when they were figuring out where to put their feet on the board. Chances are, I taught them how to drop in for the first time. Some of the first tricks that they learned? I probably invented some of them. Or I was there when someone else invented them.”
This is Macdonald’s charm. A narrator in a sport steeped in oral history, he’s competing in these Olympics as a sort of patron saint. He’ll be there — Wednesday, men’s park prelims, fourth heat, fifth and final run. Andrew Macdonald from Great Britain.
Sort of.
Macdonald was born and raised around Boston. He fell into skateboarding early. His first driveway ramp was a quarter pipe, 8 feet wide, 8 feet high. He built it with ramp plans ordered from a magazine and soon emerged as a serious skater living on the wrong side of the country. He moved to San Diego to pursue the lifestyle.
Andy Macdonald and Tony Hawk talk at the Paris Olympic skateboarding venue. The two were key figures in the sport’s jump to the mainstream. (Garry Jones / Getty Images)
That’s where the legend grew. At the same time “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” was hitting the shelves as a video game that every person of a certain age remembers, Macdonald had his own video game being released for PlayStation 1. “MTV Sports: Skateboarding Featuring Andy Macdonald.” The game looked an awful lot like Pro Skater and came with a musical accompaniment that was extremely Year 2000. System of a Down, Cypress Hill, Deftones, Pennywise, Goldfinger.
You might not remember Macdonald’s version because Hawk’s was comically better.
“It kind of vanished into the ether,” Macdonald says with a laugh.
But this was a time when skateboarders were going mainstream and the X Games were bringing action sports into people’s homes. Macdonald was in the middle of all of it. He was involved in an Olympic skating movement that began around 2003 or 2004, after NBC took over Olympic broadcast rights. He was a founding board member of USA Skateboarding not because he wanted to be an Olympian, but because “I just wanted to have some involvement as our sport went in that direction.”
The sport would have to wait until Tokyo 2020 before finally debuting.
Macdonald watched those Games from afar, seeing a long line of friends get their Olympic moment, albeit in a setting sapped by the pandemic. After the Games, he heard story after story about what it felt like to be an Olympian. One skater, Amelia Brodka, an American with parents from Poland, who competed in Tokyo under the Polish flag, suggested Macdonald look at his options.
As it turns out, Rodrick Macdonald, Andy’s father, was born in Luton, England, about 30 miles north of London.
So Macdonald looked into getting a British passport.
Then he looked into Paris 2024.
Last July, shortly before his 51st birthday, Macdonald made it through the Olympic Qualifier Series in Budapest.
“By an act of God,” he says.
“Some of the first tricks that they learned? I probably invented some of them,” Macdonald says of competing against teenagers in the Olympics. (Barrington Coombs / Getty Images)
Now he’s here, ready to compete in an event against a field led by defending gold medalist Keegan Palmer, a 21-year-old Aussie. The top American is 17-year-old Gavin Bottger.
Skill-wise, Macdonald remains among the best skaters in the world. Physically, things are a little different.
“They take a slam on cement and are back on their feet,” he says of his teenage competitors. “They get up and are like, ‘Where are we skating this afternoon!?’ I’m like, ‘Eh, I’m gonna go pick up my kids from school. Like, this is it for me skating today.’”
Macdonald has been jumping into the air and landing on his feet or his knees since about 1990. He’s avoided major injuries, but not defied time. His body is 51. Cartilage is calcified. Ankles are worn. Knees are worn. Lower back is wrenched.
His contemporaries are coaches. Sam Beckett, the British national team coach, had a long career in vert and park disciplines. He and Macdonald go way back, mainly because Macdonald was Beckett’s cabin counselor at the annual Woodward Camp near State College, Pa.
Macdonald, see, is 19 years older than Beckett.
That’s what happens when you’re a walking history book.
“The last time I was here was 16 years ago, and I was doing a demo with Tony Hawk inside the Grand Palais,” he said this week. “There was like 5,000 people in the Grand Palais, and Tony did a 900, which bought the house down, obviously.
“But that wasn’t even the end of the show, because he grabbed the mic and he was like, ‘And now, everyone watch Lin-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.”
There’s more coming on Wednesday. Macdonald, who Hawk says is a “prime example of how much discipline can pay off,” will get a prologue to his own story.
It’s one all those younger guys might tell someday.
(Top photo of Andy Macdonald practicing ahead of the Paris Olympics: Garry Jones / Getty Images)
