SA skateboarding champ on a mission to qualify for Olympics

Coming from a family of athletes and not being able to get into a single sports team meant skating was an escape for a 10-year-old boy from Athlone, Cape Town.

Now, 15 years later, his escape has earned him a place as one of the highest-ranked skateboarders in Africa and he is well on his way to achieving his mission of winning himself an Olympic medal.

Growing up in a family of avid sports lovers and athletes, Jean-Marc Johannes said he had always had a keen interest in sports. Unfortunately, he said, he never had the opportunity to play sports in formal school because he was never chosen for any teams.

He described that phase in his life as “demotivating” and said he desperately wanted to be “a part of something positive”. That was when he discovered skateboarding.

Johannes picked up a skateboard for the first time when he turned 10 and started skating around town on weekends and after school, in place of the extracurricular sports he was rejected from.

And after more than a year of skating simply for fun, he discovered the competition element to the sport.

“I was 11 and as a joke, my friends put my name down for a contest. I was really shy but I let myself just do my thing.

“I ended up winning and at the time, I had no idea what it meant. But I knew that there was more to skateboarding than what I knew and I wanted to pursue it.”

That was where Johannes’ journey as a competitive skater began.

By the age of 16, the sport had taken Johannes around the country as he competed against other skaters. He ended up being ranked in the top-10 best skaters in the country.

But this still was not good enough for Johannes. He still felt like he was holding back. Unfortunately, he had to leave the sport when he turned 18 to attend college.

“I was skating here and there but was not getting that same fulfilment [as] when I was doing the sport. I decided to go back to skating in 2015.”

After rejoining the sport and honing his skills on the board, Johannes started competing again and achieving his goals, including competing internationally.

He won himself SA’s first international gold medal but also a title as the Action Sports Festival World Series best skateboarder in 2016. He also broke the Guinness world record by doing the most nollie heel flips in one minute in 2018.

Johannes has now set his goal to qualifying for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, where he would be competing with the world’s greatest skateboarders.

He moved up 150 places, ahead of 220 global Olympic skateboarding qualifying athletes, after a competition in Praca Duo, Brazil, last month.

He has bypassed several other African teams, including Libya and Morocco – and some of the US national team’s athletes – making him one of the highest-ranking skateboarders on the African continent.

Of his 15-year journey as a skater, Johannes said: “I am really very happy. This has made a statement, that you can achieve anything you want to achieve.

“In five years, I hope to open an academy to show [hopefuls] the right path and to give them the right knowledge on how to achieve the impossible,.”

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