View from the North 40: Consider the modern miracle of the 1260 spin

Professional skateboarder Mitchell “Mitchie” Brusco, 22, competing Saturday in Skateboard Big Air at the X Games Minneapolis 2019, became the first skateboarder in history of the world to land a 1260 in the competition. That’s a spin of 3.5 rotations.

Did anyone imagine such a thing could be done in the beginning?

Skateboarding is relatively new in the history of sports. Sure the wheel has been around literally for ages, but it wasn’t until the 1940s that someone yanked them off some roller skates and attached them to a crate and board to make a scooter of sorts.

Then some surfer dudes and chicks in the off-season got the bright idea to lose the crate and do some sidewalk surfing; by the early ’60s skateboarding was its own thing.

All this occurred much quicker than the evolution of ice skating.

Scientists apparently have narrowed down the first appearance of ice skates to about 3000 B.C. in Scandinavia and Russia. The blades were actually made of bone, and the skaters used a big stick to get themselves moving.

Wikipedia cited my favorite source about the history of ice skating. The 12th century monk William Fitzstephen described some kids around London skating toward each other at high speed, their “sticks held high in the air,” then whacking each other with the sticks until someone fell. They often, he said, injured each other’s heads and broke bones. So now we know when hockey was invented.

Here’s the more important thing about the history of skating: It wasn’t until sometime in the 13th or 14th century that someone, a Dutch someone, thought to make the blades out of metal. That’s a long time.

Think about it.

Credit goes to the first skaters in the Stone Age, for sure, for figuring out using bones to help their shoes glide on ice. However, humans went through both the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, started writing, and made fierce armor, metal cookware, windmills — the Dutch had windmills and still strapped bones to their feet to skate. Humans had gunpowder, printing presses and clock towers before metal blades replaced bones for ice skates.

I would like to point out here that this is all beside my original point. I was just amazed that it took so long to make metal skate blades. Seriously, though, someone thought to put metal rims on wheels and nail a metal shoe onto a horse’s hooves long before they replaced that clunky ol’ bone with a metal blade.

Then it took another 500 years for Canadian Kurt Browning to land the first quadruple jump — the one in which the skater leaps into the air and spins four times before landing.

I should move on to recover at least some of my original point, and a little bit of dignity, but before I give this up, I will defend the time frame for development of ice skates.

The wheel, complete with an axle, came about as early as about 4500 B.C., and it did take even longer to get from there to the skateboard than it did to make metal skate blades. It even took a long time to get from the first wheel to the first roller skates in the 18th century.

I don’t mean to make you sound like simpletons, skateboarders, just keeping it real.

So what can we possible learn from all this?

We build on what has come before us, the things others did.

The first wheel was likely used to grind food — that was a dang life-saving miracle of modern mass production. That first person using the first stone wheel to make the stuff that makes the bread to feed the people did not, I think it is safe to say, imagine a 1260 on a skateboard or a world in which people do them for a living — making some dough 21st century style, if you will.

I’m not making any judgments. I don’t even know if I have a decent point to make. I’m just saying that this simple thing is kind of amazing when you think about it.

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And cave drawings have evolved to this column at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40/.