FERNANDINA BEACH, Fla. — Dressed in all black from head to toe in the scorching heat of mid-July, Poe Pinson mounts the ramp, skateboard in hand, on an afternoon that sends many a 19-year-old scurrying for the surf of the Atlantic Ocean half a block away.
Is this a comfortable way to spend a Florida summer? When the Olympics are only days away, everything changes.
"It's rare that it's something you get to experience with people you consider good friends," she said. "It's going to be surreal."
A high-flying skater from the Sunshine State side of the Florida-Georgia line, Pinson is ready to write a new chapter in Nassau County sports history when she competes in the women's street event for skateboarding at the Olympics in Paris.
On Amelia Island, the countdown is already underway.
Her family will be cheering on her every move. Her father, Kenny Pinson, said he's already lined up a rental in Paris not far from the Louvre. Fans at home are preparing watch parties for the Olympic qualifying round in the early-morning hours on Sunday, July 28, followed by the championship round later on the same day. Fernandina Beach has even scheduled a parade for two weeks after her planned return from France.
Now, this Nassau County teenager is ready to boldly go where not many go during a lifetime, marching in the parade of nations alongside the great athletes of the United States and the world.
Swimming champions like Caeleb Dressel and Ryan Murphy and Katie Ledecky will be there. Basketball scorers like LeBron James and A'ja Wilson. Golfers like Scottie Scheffler and Nelly Korda. Poe Pinson is going to be there, too, a skateboarding teenager among the bright lights of the planet.
"Maybe," joked Kenny Pinson, "you could get [Novak] Djokovic's autograph."
Most athletes in Paris have dreamed for nearly their whole lives of Olympic glory. For Pinson, it wasn't even on the radar until the last few years.
"It feels crazy. It feels insane," she said. "It's never been like, 'Oh, I really, really want to go to the Olympics and do this.' It's kind of just been a thing that weirdly worked out."
Maybe that's not so strange. After all, when she took her first visit to the Fernandina Beach Skate Park, skateboarding wasn't even an Olympic sport. Skateboarding only joined the calendar for the coronavirus-delayed Games three years ago in Tokyo, when Pinson was among the alternates but didn't make the cut.
In Paris, every trick brings her one step closer to history.
No American woman has yet won a medal in Olympic skateboarding, a sport where Japan has risen to the top. In Tokyo, Japan's Momiji Nishiya won gold and Funa Nakayama won bronze in women's street, with Rayssa Leal earning silver for Brazil.
For several months ahead of the Olympics, Pinson had ground to make up in order to qualify. But strong performances leading up to Paris earned her one of three berths on the American women's street team, joining Paige Heyn (Tempe, Ariz.) and Tokyo Olympian Mariah Duran (Albuquerque, N.M.).
Pinson wasn't sure whether she would make the cut until after the final Olympic qualifying event in Budapest, Hungary, near the end of June. Then, she got a message from Whitney Carter, who organizes skateboarding as director of internally managed sports under the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. While Carter couldn't formally announce at the time, she made it clear that news was on the way.
"She runs the USOPC for skating, and she told me to bring my jacket and stuff," Pinson recalled. "And I was like, 'Wait, does this mean I'm in?'"
Yes, it did.
Pinson's path to Paris was paved in Fernandina. Even today, it's where she gets the right feel for what's working and what's not.
"Sometimes, when I'm not warmed up and I step on my board, I'm kind of like, 'Whoa, whoa,'" she said. "But then it gets to a point where it just kind of feels like my feet fit my board, very connected."
She got her first skateboard at age 2 and made her first trip to the park along Tarpon Street a couple of years later — not without some skepticism from her mother.
"I don't blame her," Pinson said. "Skating is basically just getting thrown into the concrete again and again for hours."
Concrete. Ouch. Here and there, Pinson's elbows and knees carry battle scars from run-ins with unforgiving construction materials, year after year after year. What makes it all worth it?
Simple enough: "All the memories and the friends, and the feeling you get when you've been either trying a trick for hours, days or weeks, even, and you land that trick… It's kind of similar to landing a run in a contest where you're like, OK, I would love to be able to land this run and you actually do."
There's always the drive to achieve something new, and the suspense of wondering whether each new move will pay off — or conclude on that concrete. For this day, at least, she's keeping it simple. No use in risking a fresh pre-Olympic ouch.
"There's an element of surprise, too," she said. "When you're skating, you never really know when you're going to land something or when you're not."
FORGING AN OLYMPIAN
On the small plot of land that is Fernandina Beach Skate Park, an Olympian was forged.
Half a block east is Fernandina's Main Beach Park and the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Half a block west is Fort Clinch, the rugged 19th-century fortifications that swung from Confederate to Union control during the Civil War, then restored by the Great Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps on the road to National Register of Historic Places status from 1972 onward.
Far newer is the adjacent skate park, only built in the mid-2000s with dimensions of roughly 40 by 30 yards, the place that shaped Pinson into the skater she is today. She embraces the role as an ambassador for the skate park and its loyal backers, who continue to work to upgrade its equipment for the next generation of aspiring athletes.
Because of the types of obstacles, she naturally gravitated toward the street style of skateboarding. There's more of the same at the Olympic course in Paris: handrails, steps and similar environmental features predominate, on a flatter course compared to park skating.
"I spent a lot of time just skating out in front of my house by myself, doing random stuff, but honestly I'm super grateful for that," she said. "That's probably what ultimately led me to [street]. With transitions on a vert ramp, a park, a bowl, whatever, you kind of have to have that bowl. But in street, you kind of just have flat ground or a ledge, and then just visualize. I just kind of fell in love more with that."
Visualize … and go.
"Her secret is adrenaline," said Kenny Pinson, who described himself as a total newcomer to skateboarding before Poe picked up the sport. "When she gets to the contest, it's like, 'Boom!' She gets her headphones on, and she's in her own little world."
SKATING: THE CREATIVE OUTLET
In a sport of creativity, Poe Pinson fits right in, and that creative spark helped lift her to the next level.
"I really love the feeling of just going fast and kind of being able to have that creative outlet," she said.
Through experiments at home, and studying tricks from the bustling online skating scene to add more and more techniques to her repertoire, she became a self-taught sensation on the Nassau County streets, completing her studies through Florida Virtual School to give her maximum options to pursue her skating dreams.
It was a little more than five years ago when Lisa Whitaker, founder of Meow Skateboards, spotted Pinson through social media, checked out some videos on YouTube and invited her to a Dew Tour event. The rest was history.
Then came several stops at the X Games, beginning in 2019 in Minneapolis, then in Chiba in Japan, and even more opportunities to test her talents.
What does it feel like to travel to Paris by skateboard?
"A lot of euphoric feelings," she said, "especially going fast and airing."
Atop a jet-black double-tail skateboard, she knows how to make things happen. Maybe it's like magic. Maybe it's like... computing.
"It feels like a hard drive or something, like an input being plugged into a computer and everything meshes together working and all the photos are uploading," she said. "I guess that's kind of what it feels like."
NOT QUITE 'OVER IT'
Not so long ago, Poe Pinson says, she was "over it."
Nearing burnout from the strain of competition, she almost didn't even enter the Olympic Qualifier Series on May 19 in Shanghai, China, the event that ended up punching her ticket to Paris. It was only after a conversation with two of her coaches that she decided to make the long trans-Pacific journey.
"Honestly, I was about to not even to do that contest," Pinson said. "I was just over it. I was done. It [competitive skateboarding] was just causing me more stress and more anxiety. It was costing me more than it was benefiting me."
As it turned out, she placed fourth in Shanghai, finishing behind only Brazil's Rayssa Leal and Japan's Liz Akama and Coco Yoshizawa. The points rocketed her upward into the top dozen in the standings.
Even more important than the points, though: The joy was coming back.
"I remembered how great it [skating] was," she said. "My friend Liv [Lovelace] from Australia, Keet [Oldenbeuving] from the Netherlands, Meagan [Guy] from Florida, Sam [Secours] from Canada, Weronika [Choromanska, from Poland], I just hung out with them and it was such a good time. I wasn't even really thinking about the contest. The park kind of ended up working out for my style, so everything just weirdly worked out."
Sometimes, Pinson dreams of a different kind of daredevil thrill. As much as she loves skateboarding, she said, diving is probably her closest thing to a dream sport outside the skate park.
"Diving is probably the thing I'm most interested in," she said.
She said that interest really caught fire after a previous visit to the United States Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, where she encountered "athletes, and I mean athletes."
Swimmers. Boxers. Sprinters in track and field, towering centers in basketball, future Olympic gymnasts. And, yes, divers, including qualifiers for the 2024 Olympic team.
"There's a bridge on the south end of the island that a few of my friends and I used to go jump off of, or jump off different things into pools… I have a lot of respect for divers, because I know how insane it is to be that precise," she said.
THE BIGGEST STAGE OF ALL
The Olympics are nearing. It's not a hometown skate park anymore. Instead, Pinson is headed for the biggest stage in world sports.
Big stages aren't totally unfamiliar for Pinson, not after the X Games and the Dew Tour. And not after globe-trotting treks to Washington and to Canada for a Nike photo shoot ahead of the Olympics.
But the Olympics are at another level. The pomp. The pageantry. The chance to win a medal in red, white and blue. The chance to, just maybe, go for… gold?
"I probably would not be able to comprehend anything for a little while [if that happened]," she said.
For many, a medal changes everything, along with the fame and fortune coming with it. For Pinson, maybe not so much.
"It's not really what skating's about for me," she said. "At the end of the day [if she wins a medal at the Olympics], I would still do the same things. Olympics, non-Olympics, sponsorships or not, if all that went away, nothing would change. I would still get the same sensation."
More than the results on the scoreboard, she says, the pure feeling of skateboarding keeps her going.
"I guess it's also sort of a form of escapism in a way," she said, "where it kind of gives you something to do outside of just society's life that's been regimented."
From half a world away at the month's end, she's hoping to inspire the First Coast's next wave of skateboarding stars.
"I'd love for someone to see it and then be like, 'Wow,'"… Hopefully, if I can get anything out of it, it's just to be able to give someone else the feeling of skateboarding," she said.
How does Olympic skateboarding scoring work?
Scoring is complicated, and the Olympic street competition includes two separate portions.
Each skater gets two 45-second runs on the course, with multiple tricks included on each run, and the higher-scoring run (on a scale of 0 to 100) counting in the standings.
In addition, the event includes a trick section, in which skaters try to land five individual tricks. The two that score highest (also on a 0-100 scale) are then added to their scores from the run portion, with a potential maximum score of 300.
The top eight skaters from the preliminaries advance to the final round, where they do it all again. First-round scores do not carry over to the final round under Olympic skating rules.
