"Three taps, three times. This is part of professional skateboarder Andrew Reynolds’ ritual when..."

“Three taps, three times. This is part of professional skateboarder Andrew Reynolds’ ritual when trying to offset his anxiety before he performs a trick. He refers to this as ‘the madness…The madness might be best understood as a superstition, a tactic of edgework to assert some control over the chaos of attempting to jump a four-foot- high and 16-foot-wide set of stairs on a precariously wheeled wooden board. But in some ways rituals are superstitions, they must be performed at certain times and follow specific procedures in order for them to be valid. Rites are performed to allay our anxieties about specific life events both big and small.”

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 Ritualised Play, Skateboarding and Religion (2020, p.179)

I share this passage from my book in response to a thread unfolding on the SLAP message board right now. It is all about the curious superstitions that skateboarders have when they skate particular spots. A quick read of them points to some rather ritualised behaviour. It is far from the first thread on SLAP to deal with skateboarding superstitions, there are actually quite a few (here, and here, and here) . This one grew out of a thread about anxieties in wearing red while skateboarding.

Partly this is superficial fun, but it is also curious to learn fo the range of superstitions that people attach to their skateboarding. These acts correspond to a type of significance many would not necessarily attribute to skateboarding. What they do highlight is that skateboarding is a type of serious play, and that play might simply be one of the most important things that we, as humans, do. More on this from my chapter…

The skateboard is like a divine object thatcan connect an individual to conceptions of existence greater than themselves. Borden develops this from the work of Henri Lefebvre (2008,p. 118), who claims that ‘toys and games are former magical objects andrituals.’ … In our final exploration of play we come tounderstand how skateboarders see themselves as having access to a special, magical realm of life. In performing ritual some skateboarders consider themselves enlightened, different from the blinkered ‘muggles’ignorant of their toy, the true essence of the city, the nearness of freedomand fraternity, and of course the enduring rewards of play.

To close off this short post I include The Vice video in which Andrew Reynolds talks about his ‘Madness’ the superstitious-OCD like-ritual that permeates his skateboarding.