Skateboarding’s sovereign excellence

This paper considers sovereign attributions to skateboarding by various public intellectuals and scholars characterized as ‘heroic’, ‘aristocratic’, and of a ‘higher style of play’. They argue that such attributions are indicative of a form of internal excellence (areté) that manifests externally in a continuum from criminal vandal to Olympic athlete not unlike similar attributions in Archaic and Ancient Greece as well as the Edo period of Japan. They argue further that skateboarding’s sovereign excellence includes subversive elements that present a ritualized reworking of the meaning and value of the city, tacitly redeeming it from a merely pecuniary role. While toying with sovereignty, its value for understanding excellence within the sport enclave, the authors also propose an epistemology that takes seriously the mythic poetics of skateboarding.