The Handrail, According to Wikipedia
I was never a skater or a snowboarder.
If I buy a lift ticket, I put two planks on my feet and they don’t leave the surface unless I’m in a chairlift or falling. I was never a “hotdogger,” but I don’t dislike them, their risks on the mountains, or the changes they’ve made to sports. I marvel at what they can do. Which is why I’ll always watch the Olympics.
As usual, I find naysayers off the mark. Critics say the Olympics are too commercial and corporate or they are too elitist. I’ve read time and again about the money host cities waste building infrastructure they will never use again.
A kid from any country on a podium with a medal and how hard that kid has tried over a young lifetime—it’s all worth it.
What will I take away from this Olympics?
The ice in New England has been terrible this winter. I’m constantly strapping on my boot crampons just for the hazardous walk from my office parking lot to my office building—a converted residence and historical New England landmark. The ironwork on the porch is so old it has boot scrapers from a time when mud filled the street.
It occurred to me when I grabbed that ironwork on the slick porch steps the other day—I’d seen handrails the previous two weeks in a wildly different context without noticing.
The 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea are the second Olympics to feature Slopestyle Skiing and Snowboarding. Slopestyle is a downhill competition where the course features obstacles that allow athletes to perform various jumps and tricks.
When you see snow skiers spinning into the air off curved ramps, flipping upside-down with their skis crossed, then landing and sliding down angular surfaces that rise from the snow, that’s slopestyle. Those curved or boxy terrains represent the drained swimming pools, concrete staircases, curbs, benches, and fences in urban and corporate landscapes that became the first improvised courses for the first skateboarders.
I confirmed all of this on Wikipedia. One thing I love about Wikipedia is you can watch knowledge come into its own in real time. The first article I looked up was the word “rail.”
The term “rail” has what Wikipedia calls a “disambiguation page” to outline and resolve the different uses and definitions one word can have across many disciplines. A rail is a train track, a type of bird, a Missouri ghost town, a British folk-rock band, and the structural supports we use daily. Nowhere on Wikipedia’s rail disambiguation page is there a listing for the skateboarding, cycling, snowboarding, and slopestyle skiing element.
Even as it continuously improves, Wikipedia has millions of similar oversights. Its skatepark article links to its handrail article, but the handrail article doesn’t link back to or mention skateparks.
Skateboarding’s controversial history could have something to do with this. Before terrain parks existed, the business owners, city officials, and taxpayers who owned private and public handrails considered skateboarders to be trespassers and vandals.
Yet skateboarders persisted. Experimental by nature, they moved from skateboard decks to bicycles to off-road mountain bikes (BMX). They brought their tricks and flat decks to winter mountains with snowboards. Then they brought their terrain parks. Then skiers began to try the terrain parks too.
As I watched Olympic skiers slide down handrails for all the world to see, I wondered if skateboarders had any hopes of competing for gold.
Apparently, they do. In 2020, in Tokyo, Japan, for the first time in history, rails will be everywhere. Skateboarding, BMX freestyling, surfing, and sports climbing will all make their debut as official and not just demonstration events. Interestingly enough, baseball and softball will do the same.
Olympic slopestyle skiing has brought official recognition to the snowboarders and skateboarders that started it all.
Not only will rails and the other elements of terrain parks soon be Olympic venues, they will also sit among their original city infrastructure counterparts in downtown Tokyo, a few of which must bare the scars of early battles between officials and the first Japanese skateboarders.
I guess everyone will know soon enough where they can put their No Skateboarding signs. Kind of brings new context to the old expression “run out of town on a rail.”
(If any of my students are interested, someone needs to update the handrail article and rail disambiguation page on Wikipedia to reflect its latest definition.)