Olympics 2020 Athletes to Know: Skateboarder Mariah Duran

In the lead up to the Olympics 2020, Teen Vogue caught up with some of the brightest Team USA stars heading to Tokyo. Here, learn about skateboarder Mariah Duran and her path to the Games.

When Mariah Duran drives, she makes sure to look out the window. That way, she can notice things the rest of us don’t — handrails, stairs, benches. To her, those things aren’t just details of the landscape; they’re places where she could fly. “Sometimes the best path to take might not be the one you see yet, but the one you can create,” she says.

The 24-year-old sits outside in sunny Los Angeles, where she and her two brothers spend their days immersed in the local skating scene. Together, they meet each day with one clear purpose: To be “on the board as much as possible.”

Their mission? For Mariah to become one of the U.S. women who will compete in skateboarding at the Olympics for the first time. It’s a daunting goal for anyone; still, when we talked about it in April, Mariah leaned back in her chair with the relaxed attitude one would expect from a skateboarder. (We now know Mariah has secured her spot on Team USA, but when we spoke that news was still ways away.) Maybe that’s because she had just gotten her second dose of the COVID vaccine, and was taking a break from sleeping it off. Or maybe it’s because in her sport, falling down the handrails, stairs, or benches is to be expected — it’s what you do next that counts.

Of course, in skateboarding, falling is how you learn. Mariah was nine or 10 when she first followed her older brother to the skatepark in their hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “I kind of just did everything he did,” she said.

She had tried other sports, but this was different — with skating, you have no coach, no trainer, no teacher. Instead, you have community, and you have trial and error. “We would kind of just go to the skate parks and if we wanted to learn something, try to figure it out,” she said. “And if not, ask somebody who could do it. So it was kind of like you were your own coach.” Mariah followed her brother’s lead, learning the same skills as they went, and asking all the same questions.

The process was difficult; at times, it was really, really frustrating. “It’s definitely a love/hate kind of deal,” she said. “You love it so much, but it’s just not easy.” No matter what she learned from her brothers or her friends, at the end of the day, learning to skateboard was between Mariah and her board. She remembers trying to land her first kickflip — where the board flips under your feet and you land back on it — every day for months, jumping and flipping the board under her feet over and over on the pavement in front of her house. She started to get frustrated. Why was something that came so easily to her brothers so difficult for her? “I remember when I landed on [the board] and flipped back, and that was the closest I’d ever gotten,” she said. She ran into her house and told the first person she saw.

From there, things got easier. “It’s [wild] because all those hours that you spent trying to learn that one trick, it clicks after that,” she said.

Mariah was hooked. Plus, she clearly had a knack for the sport. But was it worth pursuing? At the time, she says, there didn’t seem to be much of a future in it. There were no college scholarships for skating, and there were few examples of women succeeding at the professional level. Then, during her senior year of high school, her basketball coach said, “Why don’t you just skate?” (“Not like in a bad way,” she laughs. More like, “you have this talent, why don’t you just see where that can take you?”) and it hit her — why didn’t she? Mariah spent her days finding creative ways to move through the world on her board. Why couldn’t she do the same thing with her career?

She decided to make skating her priority. After graduating from high school, she started to win small, local competitions. Then, her star rose quickly — she went to a 2015 X-Games as an alternate, then started getting small sponsors. In 2016, she took second place.

As she got more and more successful, Mariah gained her parents’ support for their daughter’s unique career. Mariah’s skating took her everywhere — to LA, where she would sleep on friends’ couches, join the skating scene, and skate under the sun; to Austin for the 2016 X-Games; to Minneapolis in 2017 — but without the big backing of sponsors, she needed money for travel. The Durans hosted pancake breakfasts at the local Applebee’s, and Mariah took a job waiting tables at another restaurant.

For each event she competed in, she hoped they could scrape enough together to join her.

That’s the thing about her family, she said. “It’s always been a family affair kind of deal,” she laughs. Mariah’s older and younger brothers both skate, but the pool for men is much more competitive than for women, meaning Mariah’s star shines a bit brighter, and the family rallies around her. Once, she said, her dad and brother drove overnight to Chicago to meet her there and support her skating, since they couldn’t afford to fly.

All of that changed at X-Games Minneapolis in 2018. Mariah had come in 10th place at the same event the previous year. This time, she tried something new: she trusted herself. “I kind of let go of the idea of winning,” she said. “I put so much pressure on myself before.” The strategy paid off. In her second of three runs, she hit all of her tricks but one, finishing with a kickflip. She walked off to the side to wait for her score — an 87.66 put her safely in first place.

”I think the first gold medal hit the hardest,” she said. ”My parents were there, my brothers were there, and they kind of just knew after the run.” Mariah remembers her mother crying. She remembers her grandmother calling her afterwards, saying she’d watched the competition live. She still wonders how her grandmother figured out how to stream it.

Then, she flew to Sydney to win another title — without her family by her side. Now, she knew she could do it on her own.

At that point, “all the stars aligned.” Sponsors were calling, and Mariah quit her job at the restaurant. In 2019, she signed a deal with Mountain Dew. In 2020, she helped Adidas design a new Superstar sneaker. The pancake breakfasts, the scrambling to get her family to travel with her, all of it was over, and all of it was worth it. Now, she’s working toward her biggest stage yet. “I’m really looking forward to meeting Mariah Duran after the Olympics because I just know it’s not going to be an easy road,” she said. Foreign spectators have been banned from attending the Games because of COVID-19, so her family will likely have to watch her from home.

At the Games, she’ll also act as an ambassador for women’s skateboarding as it makes its Olympic debut. Growing up, Mariah was often the only girl at skate parks. “All eyes are on you. Of course, you’re the only girl. You get used to it...I just didn’t care.” She found supportive spaces where everyone was learning, and gender didn’t matter. “When you step on a board, you don’t feel like a boy or a girl, you just feel like a skater at that point.” She’s getting less and less alone the longer she skates (“There’s a new girl every contest,”), and that will likely accelerate when girls see her compete at the Olympics. Maybe they’ll follow the path that Mariah forged for them.

If they do, they’ll definitely fall trying. “A lot of skaters who are in it to this day probably fell the first time they stepped on a board,” Mariah said. “They had to decide if they wanted to get back up and keep going or get back up and put it away.”

Mariah decided to get back up, and it’s paying off.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue