Sky Brown has spent much of the past three months moving from one competition to the next, but she says the constant travel has not changed how she sees herself. At 18, the British Japanese athlete says skating and surfing are only one part of her life and have never defined who she is.
“I’ve been on the road nonstop,” Brown said. “I was home for literally one day over the last three months.” That stretch has taken her across the globe, from Rome to Sacramento to Japan, while she has continued competing at a high level in both sports.
A nonstop schedule across two sports
Brown’s recent run has included the first LA28 qualifier of the season in Rome, where she won silver, followed by X Games Sacramento, where she finished second. Earlier this month, she traveled to Japan for X Games Chiba and won gold in park skateboarding. This weekend, she will compete in X Games New Orleans for the championship before heading to Huntington Beach, California, for the US Open surfing competition.
The pace fits the kind of athlete Brown has become. She has built her profile around competing in both skating and surfing, and she has continued collecting results in each. In March, she secured her second skateboarding world championship in São Paulo, Brazil. In May, she surfed the Stab High in Virginia Beach. That came after she represented Great Britain in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics at age 13 and won bronze in the women’s park skateboarding event.
How Brown sees her identity
Brown said she has long understood why she keeps showing up in front of cameras and on competition fields, even as her audience has grown. She said she has always shared videos on social media to tell a story and hopefully inspire people, especially girls, and that growing up with so many eyes on her helped her stay focused on that purpose.
For Brown, the medals matter, but they are not the whole story. “Skating and surfing are only one part of my life,” she said. “They’ve never defined who I am.”
That outlook is notable because Brown already has major accomplishments in both sports, yet she still talks about them as pieces of a larger identity. With more events ahead, including X Games New Orleans and the US Open surfing competition, she continues to balance elite results with the message that she is more than any single finish, title, or discipline.
