Tony Hawk is the most important skateboarder of all time. This crown is pretty unassailable, as Hawk was the person who is viewed as being most responsible for helping the sport break into the mainstream, both because of what he accomplished during his competitive career and because of the iconic video game series that bears his name.
Basically, if there is any one human on earth who is most responsible for skateboarding getting to a place where it could become an Olympic sport, it is Tony Hawk. And yet despite this, while Hawk tried to have some fun on his Instagram account during the latest round of Olympic skateboarding on Tuesday night by providing bonus commentary during the event, the fun police stepped in and yelled at Hawk, pulling the copyright infringement card out of their back pockets and making him stop what he was doing at the risk of legal trouble.
— Becca Laurie (@imbeccable) August 4, 2021
Come ON. I know that Tony Hawk’s thing lately is having this very silly sense of anonymity when he goes out into public, but him doing something like this on IG is extremely good for skateboarding and its inclusion in the Olympics. And the worst part: Hawk is a correspondent for NBC’s coverage of skateboarding at the Olympics! Please just let him do this, powers that be. Absolutely nothing bad can come from letting this particular person talk about skateboarding on literally any platform.