Skateboarding ‘growing and thriving’ at home, says SA Olympian Brandon Valjalo

The South African skateboarding scene is flourishing in a way that it hasn’t before.

This past weekend, the streets of Cape Town were filled with people propelling themselves forward on arched wooden boards supported by four small polyurethane wheels.

The Red Bull Spot Check event took place at four venues: the City Bowl Park, The Company’s Garden, Thibault Square and the Civic Centre.

Local skater Ethan Cairns won the overall competition for his performances at all four venues, earning himself a golden ticket to compete at an international Red Bull skate event in 2026.

It wasn’t only South Africans on display – exhibiting the skating culture on the streets of the Mother City – international superstars, who doubled up as judges, also showed their flair.

Multiple X-Games champion Ryan Sheckler was the biggest draw alongside Australian teenage star Chloe Covell and American Olympic athletes Jamie Foy and Zion Wright.

Alongside them was South African star skateboarder and two-time Olympian Brandon Valjalo.

“The South African skateboarding industry is definitely growing and thriving,” Valjalo told Daily Maverick. “We have more skateparks popping up, we have more support.

“The federation is there, it’s starting to work towards a common goal of development. Skateboarding is alive in South Africa.

“We’re getting there in terms of international standards, facility-wise and career-wise. There’s people that can focus on skateboarding 24/7 whereas we still have the situation where you have to skate part-time.

“You have to work a job to be able to survive and then skate on the side, you know. And if you’re not totally dedicated to what you’re doing, you fall behind the guys that are working harder.”

Riding the board

Skateboarding was introduced to the Olympic Games for the first time in Tokyo in 2021 and again in Paris last year. Valjalo led South Africa’s efforts on his skateboard both times, finishing 18th in Tokyo and 12th in Paris.

“It comes with a lot of pressure,” Valjalo said about being the face of the sport in South Africa. “I want to make everybody happy.”

The Johannesburg-born skater comes from a family of talented athletes. His twin sister, Savanna Valjalo, is an apprentice jockey, while his older brother Sheldon Valjalo is an ironman athlete, having also represented Croatia internationally on the cricket field.

It’s a path Brandon nearly followed, having gained entry to Dainfern College – a Johannesburg high school – on a sports scholarship that included rugby, soccer and cricket. But he purposefully sabotaged those opportunities to pursue what he truly loved: skateboarding.

This included batting left-handed at training despite being right-handed.

“I did some sketchy things there to mess up the trials on purpose. Like being ill-disciplined in the sense that the coach would tell us to run around the field.

“Because I knew that same weekend that interschools or interprovincial cricket games would go on.

“I’d be like, damn, there’s a skate contest happening, the biggest one in South Africa at the time, which was in Kimberley.

“And I’d be like, I need to go there and meet all the pro skaters. I need to go there and meet everybody and show them what I’ve got.”

Valjalo made his debut on the local professional scene while in Grade 9 in 2013. He won the South African as well as the world youth championship title at the 2014 Kimberley Diamond Cup. He defended his South African title in 2015 before the Kimberley Diamond Cup was discontinued.

Opportunities

Valjalo rode a skateboard for the first time as a three-year-old, with his father having taken up the sport years before.

It was through the support of his parents that he was able to reach his present heights and be set on the trajectory of a professional skateboarding career.

His parents moved houses in Johannesburg to support Savanna’s horse-riding, but kept the previous house and built a skatepark there for Brandon to train on.

“For me, being able to be in that environment to have my [own] skate park, it’s where I was training pretty much the whole time building up to the Tokyo Olympics,” Valjalo explained.

“That’s my little training facility.”

The skatepark was built while Valjalo was still in high school. The timing wasn’t ideal, because shortly after, he went to boarding school at St Alban’s College in Pretoria. He’s made more use of the park now than he had the opportunity to then.

“As I’ve gotten older, being home, having that ability to skate by myself, work on those tricks that I need to work on in private that I’m too shy to try out there,” he says about using the skatepark.

“You just must make sure your foundation is always good. I appreciate that facility.

“I can’t believe my parents actually did that and started supporting my skateboarding the way they did.”

Scheckler inspiration

Valjalo’s inspiration for taking the sport seriously was through watching The Life of Ryan, a show featuring a then teenaged Ryan Sheckler, which played on MTV between 2007 and 2009.

“It’s been a dream of mine to be a professional skateboarder one day [after] being inspired by Ryan Sheckler [and] seeing his TV show,” Valjalo explained.

“It gave me and my mom that idea like, ‘Mom, you can be my momager too.”

“It was something that, for me, to this day, has motivated me to constantly progress in skateboarding and do similar tricks to what he’s done as well.

“So without Ryan Sheckler, I would not have trusted the process. I wouldn’t have stuck with it the way I did.”

Young, aspiring South African skateboarders today don’t have to look as far as America to find inspiration to pursue their dream. Valjalo is paving the way locally. DM