By Caroline Hernandez
Photography by CrownedByTwo
Our sport keeps mutating and finding new playgrounds. It takes someone to post an engaging video for others to be like, “Oh shit… that’s true, we can do that, too.” Well, downhill skating is certainly not new. It has been around since people strapped on skates, and it’s a natural pathway for those on wheels who want to chase adrenaline further than just cruising around. It has emerged from the underground and become a new trend, leaving a stronger impression over the past year or so.
Downhill skating is opening our eyes to not only how creative we can be on a simple hill, but how the simple can be the best. After an era of technical tricks, big ramps, and taking our sport to a more complex level, hill bombing comes as a refreshing act where you just roll into a state of focus and speed.
I remember this old picture of Daniele Marie a.k.a. @BabyGirlDee fakie gliding at a skateboarder’s event, then Nemo Debevoise’s insane viral clip on the San Francisco hill for the first Lazo video. This was an opener to more insane clips around the world. Some of my favorites, Katrina Belen a.k.a. @iztapasauria in Mexico, who’s always chasing hills and has popularized this practice further down in the Latin American area. Recently, Eipril and Tiaguito Blanco featured sick and sketchy clips on the Argentinian hills, and it keeps getting gnarlier each time since these are street skaters adding wallrides, spins, airs, and building up to the fast-paced hill bomb. These videos gained a lot of traction online and took roller skating to a new audience, but what makes these videos viral is the fact that skaters rarely wear helmets. If you read the comment section, it’s a bunch of strangers policing female bodies (I mean, for this specific case). You rarely see a skateboarder’s video doing something gnarly, being called out for being “a bad example,” “reckless behavior,” or “attention seeking.” Social media is so impersonal that people just throw comments they’d never say in person. It’s a love-and-hate relationship.
Anyways, the importance here is that there are women seeking adrenaline and pushing their boundaries in fields they’ve never been seen before—online and in person—and this is somehow threatening to some, but mostly inspiring and badass. Isn’t it awesome to go ahead of our own limits and push them to new playgrounds? When we were young, we were told not to get dirty, that taking risks was limited to the boys, and we somehow missed the early chance to mess around and find out.
My other favorite part is how we get to see more landscapes. Not going to lie, as much as I love bowls, most of them look the same: big concrete, curves, the same ledges and rails in every park. There’s not much we can tell from where the person is skating unless there’s a nice view behind—and most of the time, we don’t even pay attention to that. Whereas watching clips of the street skaters gives us a little more context of where they live, what people look like, how the weather is and so on.
Colombia is not far behind, and Medellín has become a skate mecca in South America. There’s a famous hill bomb—the Madre Laura. Yeah, EVERYONE wants to skate that hill since Snoop Dogg reposted some inline skaters bombing it. The same place GX1000 shot a wild video featuring fast-paced skateboarders storming down in a cinematic shot that exploded the internet. Last but not least, when Jammalyn Flower paid a visit, she needed to skate it, so some locals waited with her until 1 a.m. to roll down. This hill is so special—the landscape features the mountain neighborhood lights in the background as you roll down a long highway. I recently skated it with some friends, and it’s as magical as it looks.
If you check a map of Colombia, you can see we have the Andes crossing the whole country, and thus, a lot of the cities have expanded up the hills once there’s no more room lengthwise—so it’s basically a downhill paradise. The roads are often steep, fast, and dangerous, and as you could imagine, not in great condition. The concrete is gritty and crunchy as fuck (pretty common in Latin America, to be honest). Locals get used to it, I mean, there’s not much to choose from.
Another famous spot is the Aranjuez “cuatro esquinas,” a downhill in the middle of a neighborhood that merges two sections of a big hill. There’s this pretty specific clip of my friend Juliana as she rolls down and hits the corner with big speed—the big one is sketchy since it has a speed bump right at the end before having to swerve around a curve to keep rolling down. In one of her attempts, she crashed into some bystanders, and it looked so fun! The clip was during this yearly event called “diversión en la loma.” The exact translation is: “fun on the hill,” which is a bit odd. Held for seven editions, it started aiming to activate the skate scene in the country after the Covid restrictions. It was a great excuse to get together, and what started as a casual hangout ended up being a massive event that would shut down the streets, host a market featuring local entrepreneurs, benefit the neighbors’ shops, and give a show to a lot of curious spectators standing on the sides. It quickly became something big that everyone would look forward to.
This year, the structure changed a lot and sparked some drama. The organizers messed up, announcing an entry fee a week before the event to use some modules they’d brought up and take part in competitions. It was $50,000 COP (around $13 USD), which seems little, but it is a lot here—and honestly… why should people pay to roll down a hill when they’re the spectacle keeping the event interesting? Is this really what people want? Most just wanted to hit the big hill.
Roller skaters in Medellín are pretty outspoken and started a little rant on stories about the lack of communication, being overcharged, and how they were not welcoming to roller skaters, even though they’d been part of this for multiple editions. This spiraled to the point where the organizer said, “If you don’t want to take part in the event, then don’t come; this is mainly for skateboarders.” There was a lot of stress the week prior—and we got it, putting this together is a lot of work—but when you charge people, they’d expect an upgrade of their experience, and many felt they were taking the essence of the event away.
Neither skateboarders nor roller skaters were happy about this. The event had always been free of charge. Memes were coming and going—it was a good laugh for the whole week prior, but a big slap in the face when all the locals and some international visitors were getting ready and excited to be part of it. Long story short, after some negotiation thanks to Belica (a Medellín local roller skater), we got spaces warranted in the event, with prices that roller skaters collected last minute and some money from the sign-in.
There were some salty comments about how skateboarders didn’t want us to be there. As a big FUCK YOU to these guys, our friend Ka made this huge flag reading “Reina, patinas?” (Queen, do you skate?) on a flashy hot pink, and it was a clear statement that our community stands strong and owes nothing to a few entitled jerks. Our friends’ videos
there encouraged more of us to come over since the event is actually pretty sick, and now we weren’t even considered to be part of it.
Besides the dumb drama around it, roller skaters showed up and had a great time. People gathered to watch the big batch of girls rolling downhill, throwing tricks, and taking slams like champions. The day started with some warm-ups early on the small hill, and you could roll onto a big inflatable ramp (they had to fix it multiple times and were sitting in the middle of the big hill). Not going to lie, the ramps were fun for a while, but they left them there all day and literally shut down the main attraction—the monster drop—until sunset.
Earlier, there were some competitions like, doing the most number of jumps, going downhill, and best trick out of a launch ramp. Both were really dope, and a lot of bystanders were cheering and enjoying the show. The commentator didn’t have a clue what he was saying and kept calling the jumps “ollies” and making some sexist comments, because obviously that was how far his humor went. The organization was also tricky—the spectators kept narrowing down the course, and it sketched us out, so we had to tell them on the way up to move out of the way. Imagine crashing down at that speed into a standing crowd? That shit is really dangerous.
The real havoc started when they opened the main downhill—that was the free section of the event. Most of the day’s comments were like, “Ahh, this is usually crowded,” “Most of the people will only show up by the end of the day when it’s free.” Said and done—it seems like the thing everyone wanted was to roll there. We wished the event had that same
energy from the start; by the end of the day, most of us were tired, baked or drunk—there was no in-between. The last competition included a ring of fire that was the main attraction, and again, they put roller skaters last, and as they dropped the ring, it was not lit anymore. That was really fucked up. Belica ended up giving the roller skaters’ prizes in the area where we were all hanging out and refused to go to the event’s podium.
Roller skating here is well organized. There are a lot of hands putting in the work and growing the sport at a rapid pace. I could say we have one of the biggest communities worldwide, and it has turned into a safe space and practice for many women in the country. The point is: roller skating here doesn’t need favors. We are an active and important part of the skate scene. They were and are tough as hell, and the energy was so wild and pure. The scene here screams freedom, and everyone is so talented. They don’t step out, they talk back, and they own their spaces—a great reflection of how our character opens doors and keeps them that way.
Crossing fingers, we won’t need to coin this event and host our own next time. This whole experience just gave us more reasons to keep doing things for and by our community—to build the spaces we need. Honestly, the number of people who roller skate in this region is insane. We have something so unique, worth giving the platform it deserves and the right public to enjoy it. Sexualization is still pretty prevalent in these spaces, and once girls don’t serve as eye candy to entertain men, they act rude and entitled as fuck. Too bad—we do this for ourselves, for the feeling of self-fulfillment and the freedom that comes with smashing your bodies, feeling fierce, and standing up to do it again and again.
