Suddenly skateboarding was just a guy thing. Zero percent a gay thing. What had once been a haven for outcasts, a space free from rules and regulations, had turned into an upside-down version of conformity.
Luckily, there was one person blissfully unaware of these goings-on. One person who didn’t know there were unwritten rules about who could skate and who couldn’t: Cara-Beth Burnside. In 1978, Cara-Beth (or CB, as she became known) was just a ten-year-old girl who loved roller skating. Then she walked into Big O in the O.C., where skaters ripped up and down snake runs (narrow, wind-y, concrete paths) and carved up the clover bowl (a four-leaf-clover-shaped pool of multiple depths), and she fell hopelessly in love with skateboarding.
“I started entering pro contests in the eighties as an ammmm and I was doing gooooood,” CB said, random words stretching like taffy, sentences never coming to a full stop. “But it was harrrrrd because a lot of the guys were so lame about it… I meannnnn, a lot of the guys were coooooollll, but there’s another type of guy that just couldn’t stand to watch you skate.”
In 1989, CB became the first woman to grace the cover of a skate magazine as Thrasher’s August cover girl. In a close-up shot against a blurred, high-speed background, CB’s sticking a frontside air with her tongue doing that thing you catch yourself doing in deep concentration—an unconscious curling under and pressing against her teeth, which most people would feel self-conscious about, but not CB. If you’re into it, cool. If not, get lost.
Her pink helmet matches the bottom of her board, which is also pink and covered in stickers—Thrasher, Independent, Vans, Swatch. Her left hand in a red fingerless glove grips her rail; her right arm wrapped in a purple wrist guard shoots perpendicularly out to the side. The headlines surrounding her promise an issue filled with pools, ramps, parks, and Jane’s Addiction. The name “Cara-Beth” is nowhere to be found.
Two years later, in 1991, CB was skating for Vans for $50 a month. Now she was a cover girl and had a sponsor, but she still wasn’t pro, so she still couldn’t make money since only pros got paid out at contests.
“I mean, maybe some people would have liked to pay me, but the guys wouldn’t have been stoked on that,” CB said. “But how long are you just… gonna, like… sleep at someone’s house?”
By the mid-’90s, snowboarding had become so popular, they were even letting women do it!