At 46, skating nomad-turned-Olympian Oberholzer inspiring youth, impressing mum

With a battered skateboard beneath his arm and nothing in his pockets, Dallas Oberholzer walked into Isithumba — the Zulu village between Durban and Pietermaritzburg — in 2001. There, he wowed the youngsters with tips and flips and in return, South Africa’s skateboarding nomad was gifted a chunk of land by the village elders.
By 2009, the piece of land, overlooking the Umgeni river within the Valley of a Thousand Hills, had grown right into a homestead comprising tin-roofed huts and a skate park. That yr, the youth camp attracted Tony Hawk, the identify synonymous with the game. The American visited the village and was so enamoured by the abilities of the Zulu youngsters that he shipped personalised boards out for them.
A yr later, with the nation gripped by Fifa World Cup fever, Oberholzer too was revelling within the festivities, skating down the road to the retailers when he was arrested.
“I had been arrested for skating before. This time, I was jailed and asked to pay the bail to get out,” Oberholzer tells The Indian Express. “Ten years later, my country asked me to represent it at the Olympic Games. That’s how ridiculous skateboarding could be.”
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Oberholzer, 46, competed at skateboarding’s Olympic debut in Tokyo. He was the oldest member of Team South Africa and the second-oldest participant within the youngest sport; Fellow 46-year-old Rune ‘The Danish Destroyer’ Glifberg pipped him by eight months. Oberholzer says the veterans made it an ideal showcase for skateboarding.
“I don’t think ever again there will be a 40-year-old skateboarder at the Olympics. You’d be lucky if a 30-year-old makes it. So, it was just lovely that the introduction to skateboarding was such a mixed bag of people,” he says. “It wasn’t predictable.”
Oberholzer’s males’s park occasion was received by an 18-year-old from Australia. The mixed ages of the rostrum within the girls’s road and park occasions had been 42 and 44 respectively.

“Just like the spin of the universe, the skateboarding universe too spins fast. Things are moving faster and getting more technical. These young athletes from the start, they see things that are really good,” he says. “Whereas when I started, we aimed for things that are very average now. Their progression, their trajectory is just through the roof compared to my steady progression.”
The thick dreadlocks had been lopped off final December, making manner for smooth, more-salt-than-pepper spikes, however make no mistake, Oberholzer is a skateboarder’s skateboarder. A skateboarder of the 80s classic. The ‘OGs’ of the sport whose skating lingo bleeds into the texts and chats, generously peppered with ‘rad’, ‘gnarly’ and ‘sick’. He has fittingly ‘rad’ tales to inform. The time his jeep acquired caught within the mud within the Amazon, and he needed to fend off a jaguar by ‘roaring, Tarzaning out at the top of my lungs’. The time he chauffeured Janet Jackson’s dance troupe.
Tennis was the game of alternative for the Johannesburg child till the household rented Thrashin’ for film evening. The 1986 movie is a coming-of-age story of warring skateboarding gangs, that includes quintessential Californian skills. Josh Brolin was coming off the success of The Goonies. Red Hot Chilli Peppers had been two albums, three years outdated. Tony Hawk had turn into a outstanding identify in skateboarding however was nonetheless 13 years away from touchdown the world’s first 900 aerial spin.
The film left Oberholzer, and a bunch of South African preteens, dreaming of browsing the sidewalks and bringing the American skate tradition inland.
“California dreamin’, you know,” Oberholzer laughs. “We realised that this little toy was also a limitless tool. It could take you places, as fast as possible.”
It had taken him to 50 international locations however with little to point out for it. He moved to Durban to coach at a Tony Hawk-designed skate park. The seek for ambition and course introduced him to Isithumba in 2001, which stays his on-and-off shelter.
“I am the only white person in a 30km radius. Everybody thinks I’m crazy,” he says. “Everybody wanted to know why I wanted to live there. My parents talked about the negatives of living here but got over it later. Some comments would be backhanded, stuff like ‘good that you are helping the blacks’ but for me, this was a place to have fun, to build a safe space for skaters.”
A white South African schooled individually throughout the Apartheid period, Oberholzer discovered black friends throughout his skating runs, and stirred into motion as soon as Nelson Mandela got here to energy.

“Mandela basically said to everyone in South Africa, do what you can do, share what you have. All I did was share what I had, which was skateboarding and the culture. It helped me get over my Apartheid upbringing,” says Oberholzer. “It was the way to fight the good fight, to show that skateboarding is a legit activity to keep the youth out of trouble. I also was just on a personal mission to get it accepted, because I went through so much ridicule.”
He based the Indigo Youth Movement and Indigo Skate Camp non-profits, which run youth intervention and after-school skate programmes to maintain underprivileged youngsters away from medication and gangs. The enterprise graduate who by no means cared for a correct job helps the neighborhood with schooling and expertise coaching. The free time is spent turning deserted swimming swimming pools into skate bowls and constructing ramps.
In Tokyo, Oberholzer seen how the opposite skate groups had physios, coaches, and help crew. How Australian Keegan Palmer, who received the gold medal, is from the nation with the very best share of skateparks, and why Japan’s rise was as a result of infrastructure.
Dallas Oberholze
Since returning, he has been working away in downtown Cape Town, changing an outdated Olympic-size pool within the metropolis bowl right into a skate ramp.
“These will be attractions for skateboarding enthusiasts to come visit South Africa. After the Olympics, I am also getting calls from Nigeria and other countries to help build some skate parks there,” he says. “These parks will be training grounds for our continent’s future Olympians.”
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Skateboarding’s existential disaster — the counterculture, underground-movement-origins and the mainstream-Olympic highlight — doesn’t faze Oberholzer.
“It was always coming, in the last 10-15 years. Are there still hardcore, punk rock dudes under the bridge? Yeah. There are also skaters bench-pressing, working on the legs. The Red Bull skaters and the metalheads. That’s great. I want every person to have the choice to feel free in their body, and the sport to grow.”

In Tokyo, he represented each worlds.
“I remember hearing that in the Athletes Village, it’s hard to find people. And as soon as I landed, there were rumours that you weren’t allowed to skate inside the village. I was like, ‘yeah, that’s really going to work’,” he cackles. “All I had to do was to listen out my window to hear where the wheels were rolling in. You just had to listen for your tribe.”
During the competitors, the younger blood turned up in designer, smooth garments. Oberholzer sported the formal South African opening ceremony zebra-printed shirt. The youngsters who grew up on the ‘how to’ movies and slow-mo tutorials, confirmed bravado and dexterity. Oberholzer, who has been skating since earlier than most of the tips had been even invented, was in stark distinction along with his clean, relatively-safer runs. He was traditional punk rock in opposition to the dizzying techno/EDM. It meant he completed final, however he received one thing way more invaluable.
Dallas Oberholze was the oldest member of Team South Africa and the second-oldest participant within the youngest sport; Fellow 46-year-old Rune ‘The Danish Destroyer’ Glifberg pipped him by eight months.
“My mum is happy with me,” says Oberholzer, who had earlier remarked that qualifying for the Olympics would maybe make his disapproving mom happy with his profession alternative.
“She’s also watching skating movies, the highlight reels from Olympics. She is learning skating vocabulary,” he says. “She wanted me to stop chasing the dream once. It’s awesome to have her blessings. It’s such a good ending, such a beautiful last closure to everything I’ve chased in my life.”