Skateboarding legend Andy Macdonald, 51, gets an unlikely Olympic epilogue

Follow live coverage of day 12 of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, with 21 gold medals on the horizon

PARIS — It’s Saturday morning at the Team GB Olympic House and Andy Macdonald is wearing one of the two suits he owns. This is the new suit, but it doesn’t really fit. A little loose in the middle, a little long in the sleeves. And then there’s the problem that Macdonald, despite being 51, looks ridiculous in a suit. That’s not an insult. It’s the miserable truth.

“Skateboarders wear suits to weddings and funerals, that’s it,” he says.

Macdonald is in a new world, so he’s dressed for the occasion. As a member of the British Olympic team, he’s been given a full set of new gear and instructions. This is what to wear to the opening ceremony. This is what to wear to the closing ceremony. This is a load of official Adidas gear. And this is a suit for formal occasions. You know, in case the King invites him for tea.

“But I don’t think the King is going to invite me to tea,” says Macdonald, “so I thought I would wear the suit to that press conference.”

Macdonald’s laugh lines are deep, the byproduct of a life of fun. The suit is meant as a joke, he says. A nod to all the illogical boundaries he’s had to cross to get here. That he’s his old self — born in July 1973 — in a sport often dominated by teenagers. That he was a central figure in the early movement to add skateboarding to the Olympics, doing so in the early 2000s, before his current Team GB teammates Sky Brown and Lola Tambling, both 16, were born. That he’s competing for England despite being born and raised in the United States. That he, one of the sport’s true originals, is about to invade an Olympic park a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais.

Macdonald is aware of his age. He’s asked about it every day. He’s asked to recite a long, miserable list of brutal injuries. A personal wiki page of broken this, shattered that. He’s asked about having an 18-year-old son while competing with 16- and 17-year-olds.

But then Macdonald turns everything around.

The injuries? In 35 years of skating, he’s broken an ankle once and a kneecap once. He’s had a scoop in his knee once and a scoop in his ankle once. That’s all. “Very lucky,” he says.

And why should he feel weird? He’s not old. He’s just been at the skate park longer than everyone else, that’s all.

“Think of it this way: I was there when the teenagers came,” Macdonald says. “I was there when they were trying to figure out where to put their feet on the board. Chances are I taught them how to do their first drop. Some of the first tricks they learned? I probably came up with a few. Or I was there when someone else came up with them.”

Such is Macdonald’s charm. A storyteller in a sport steeped in oral history, he enters these Olympics as a kind of patron saint. He’ll be there — Wednesday, men’s park preliminaries, fourth heat, fifth and final run. Andrew Macdonald of Great Britain.

Kind of.

Macdonald was born and raised near Boston. He started skateboarding at an early age. His first ramp was a quarter pipe, 8 feet wide, 8 feet high. He built it from ramp plans he ordered from a magazine and quickly became a serious skater who lived on the wrong side of the country. He moved to San Diego to pursue that lifestyle.

Andy Macdonald and Tony Hawk chat at the Olympic skateboarding venue in Paris. The two were key figures in the sport’s leap into the mainstream. (Garry Jones/Getty Images)

There the legend grew. At the same time that “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” was hitting the shelves as a video game that everyone of a certain age remembers, Macdonald had his own video game released for the PlayStation 1. “MTV Sports: Skateboarding Featuring Andy Macdonald.” The game was very similar to Pro Skater and came with a musical accompaniment that was extremely Year 2000. System of a Down, Cypress Hill, Deftones, Pennywise, Goldfinger.

You may not remember Macdonald’s version, because Hawk’s was ridiculously better.

“It kind of disappeared into thin air,” Macdonald says, laughing.

But this was a time when skateboarding was going mainstream, and the X Games were bringing action sports into people’s homes. Macdonald was right in the thick of it. He was involved in an Olympic skating movement that started around 2003 or 2004, after NBC picked up the Olympic broadcast rights. He was a founding member of USA Skateboarding, not because he wanted to be an Olympian, but because “I just wanted to be involved as our sport went in that direction.”

It would take until Tokyo 2020 before the sport would finally get underway.

Macdonald watched those Games from afar, watching a long line of friends experience their Olympic moment, albeit in a setting hollowed out by the pandemic. After the Games, he heard story after story about what it was like to be an Olympian. One skater, Amelia Brodka, an American with Polish parents who was competing in Tokyo under the Polish flag, suggested Macdonald explore his options.

It turns out that Rodrick Macdonald, Andy’s father, was born in Luton, England, about 30 miles north of London.

Macdonald therefore wanted to apply for a British passport.

Then he looked at Paris 2024.

Last July, just before his 51st birthday, Macdonald reached the Olympic qualifiers in Budapest.

“By an act of God,” he says.

“Some of the first tricks they learned? I probably came up with a few,” Macdonald says of competing against teenagers at the Olympics. (Barrington Coombs/Getty Images)

Now here he is, ready to compete in an event against a field led by defending gold medalist Keegan Palmer, a 21-year-old Aussie. The top American is 17-year-old Gavin Bottger.

In terms of skills, Macdonald remains one of the best skaters in the world. Physically, things are a bit different.

“They get a smack on the cement and they get back on their feet,” he says of his teenage competitors. “They get up and say, ‘Where are we going to skate this afternoon!?’ I’m like, ‘Uh, I’m going to pick up my kids from school. This is it for me today, skating.'”

Macdonald has been jumping in the air and landing on his feet or knees since about 1990. He has avoided serious injury, but he has not defied time. His body is 51. Cartilage is calcified. Ankles are worn out. Knees are worn out. Lower back is twisted.

His contemporaries are coaches. Sam Beckett, the coach of the British national team, had a long career in vert and park disciplines. He and Macdonald have known each other for a long time, not least because Macdonald was Beckett’s hut counselor at the annual Woodward Camp near State College, Pa.

Macdonald is 19 years older than Beckett.

That’s what happens when you’re a walking history book.

“The last time I was here was 16 years ago, and I did a demo with Tony Hawk at the Grand Palais,” he said this week. “There were about 5,000 people at the Grand Palais, and Tony did 900, which of course bought the house out.

“But that wasn’t even the end of the show, because he grabbed the mic and said something like, ‘And now, everybody watch Lin-Z Adams do the first ever women’s 540!’ And then she came in and did the first ever women’s 540, right in the middle of the Grand Palais. That’s a little bit of Parisian skateboarding history for you.”

More to come on Wednesday. Macdonald, who Hawk says is a “great example of how discipline can pay off,” gets a prologue to his own story.

It’s one that all those younger guys will tell one day.

(Top photo of Andy Macdonald training in preparation for the Paris Olympics: Garry Jones/Getty Images)