Vertical Skating

Adventurous youngsters in the 1960’s in coastal Los Angeles, California developed Vertical Skateboarding. During that time skateboarding was going through its first wave of popularity and feisty young people were discovering and trying out new terrains and new more adventurous ways to ride.

According to stories the very first instance of vertical skating took place when the parents of a skate boarder left town for the weekend. The boy who stayed behind along with his friends drained the swimming pool which had smooth transitioned walls. The skaters stood in the shallow end of the emptied pool and rolled towards the deep end steering their boards around the bowled end, that what is known as the "carve. When a person is carving it means the person is taking a wide turn and while doing so all the four wheels of the skateboard remain off the surface of the wall suspended in air, in this case the walls of the swimming pool. Pools were the most favored vertical terrains during those days and in the seventies.

As the years passed by the vertical Skateboarding evolved and the skate boarders introduced many new maneuvers done by free style street skate boarders and incorporated them into the ramp skating. The daring 'Kick flips'- an aerial maneuver in which the skate boarder rolls up the ramp " kicking' the board into a somersault, snatching it with the hand mid air, and putting it back on his feet before landing and many other more improvised and even more daring spinning tricks have become common.

By: Madhuchanda Saxena

Content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vert_skating