For Liv Lovelace, skating is more than a sport - 'It's life'
After missing out on qualifying for Tokyo 2020 due to injury, the 20-year-old Australian is well-positioned to secure a spot for Paris 2024. And it would mean the world to someone who lives and breathes skateboarding.
For some, skateboarding is about having fun, a hobby. For others, it’s a lot more serious - a competition or a job, a career or a way to make ends meet.
For Liv Lovelace, it’s life in itself.
“It's life,” Lovelace told Olympics.com ahead of WST Dubai Street 2024 this week, when asked what skating meant her. “Like, I don't know what my life would be like without it.
“All my friends are around skating and I just like being able to go skating by myself and put headphones in or listen to the world go by and be in my own world.
“It's my happy place.”
Liv Lovelace: 'I just want to do people proud'
Lovelace took up skateboarding when she was eight or nine years old, hanging around with the boys on the streets of her hometown Sydney. She recalls being “instantly hooked”by the borderlessness of the sport.
Lovelace used to play football as well, but it didn’t take long for skateboarding to supplant it as the focal point of her life, serving as a lens for the introspection she needed during her formative years.
“Just the freedom,” she said. “Being able to be a little kid and kind of run away in my own little world and get lost, and I feel like it gave me an outlet to become the person that I am.
“I feel like if I didn't have skateboarding, it would have been a lot harder for me to become who I am and find my own sexuality and like, find my style and find the people that I want to be around.
“I used to play soccer. I was in a little rep soccer team and I would like, do soccer and then go straight from soccer to skating on like one of the days of the week. And every time I'd be like, ‘Oh, I don't want to go to soccer, I just want to go skating.’
“When I started to have that feeling, I was like, I just want to do this.”
Of all the kids Lovelace began skating with, she is the only one still at it - and then some.
The 20-year-old is ranked 18th in the world, third from Australia behind Chloe Covell and Haylie Powell. If Lovelace maintains her position through the Olympic Qualifier Series in June, she will have secured one of three quota allotted to her country in women’s street for Paris 2024.
The qualifying campaign to Tokyo 2020 was far less smooth sailing for Lovelace, who broke her left humerus in two locations in the build-up to the Games while skating on the iconic Melbourne spot Gold Rails. The injury required three surgeries and 10 months for full recovery, seven of which kept her off a deck.
But Lovelace says she wouldn’t trade the painful experience for anything.
“I feel like that taught me a lot about myself. It gave me a lot of resilience and I wouldn't change it because I feel like now I'm in a much better place and I enjoy the contest skating way more this time around, trying to qualify for Paris than when I was kind of doing it trying to get to Tokyo.
“I, like, crave the feeling of eating concrete. It's really weird to say that. I don’t know, it keeps me humble, it brings me peace and brings me happiness. Like eating s--- actually is a good feeling.”
One of the things Lovelace likes most about skateboarding is that it takes her to different corners of the world where she gains invaluable life experience (see above Instagram post from Tokyo in December). She says she does not want to go to a country and be buried in a stadium for a week and fly home.
Paris would be no different. Although the life experience there would be felt not only by her but also by the people who helped Lovelace reach her first Olympic Games.
“It would mean a lot. I think it would be an achievement that is going to stay with me for the rest of my life. I think would be really cool,” she said.
“I want to do my country proud. But most importantly, it would be sick for my family and even for my grandparents as they're getting on in life. I really want them to hopefully come to Paris as that may be their last big international trip out of Australia.
“But I just want to do people proud. I want to have fun and do people proud and it would mean the world to me.”