At age 47 it’s hard to believe Tony Hawk is still pushing the limits of a sport he helped propel into the mainstream nearly 30 years ago.
But that’s exactly what this skate boarding legend did recently when he conquered a first-ever horizontal loop.
“This is all my crazy idea,” Hawk says in the video presented by Sony Action Cam. “Basically this ramp is a vertical spiral, a sideways loop. As far as we know, noboby has ever done anything like this.”
Hawk is widely credited for being a trailblazer in the sport of skateboarding, constantly pushing the limit on what is possible on four wheels and a wooden board. In 1999, he shocked the sporting world by becoming the first boarder to pull a 900 (2.5 complete rotations) off a vertical ramp. He did it at the X-Games that year in front of a live television audience.
Then in 2013, he and other pro skaters conquered a vertical loop, something that had at least partially been tried before. In the horizontal loop, Hawk takes on uncharted territory.
“People ask me how do you approach, and I’m like, I don’t know. I’ll just have to do it the hard way,” he says in the video, which shows a bit of the process it took the legend to master the course.
Photo credit: Youtube
