The slow realization that what I thought was real was actually fake

Since the early 80s as a little kid, I've been skateboarding and riding bmx bikes off and on, including sometimes at ramp parks, concrete pool parks, and other permanent venues.

In the early days of skateboarding and bmx competitions, they'd hold them at the few skateparks that existed in places like Southern California. Eventually, they even started building parks for a competition, that left a park behind for local kids to use after.

Skateparks were pretty rare in the 1980s and eventually lawsuits scared property owners so much that they were all bulldozed and demolished.

Around the year 2000, cities around the country started to change their tune on what citizens could sue for if they were hurt in public spaces (with ample "use at your own risk" warnings) In Oregon, the state began building dozens and dozens of skateparks. Successful skateboarders and musicians started foundations to help build them across the country and today it's not that unusual for most moderately-sized cities to have a really cool skatepark that a couple hundred kids and teens can use every day.

I've watched every X Games and in the early days, they'd use skateparks or build new ones to house the competition, but eventually they started holding the events in large cities with popular tourist backdrops and naturally, competitions went from being held at permanent skateparks to temporary ramps set up on elaborate forms of scaffolding.

There are whole businesses dedicated to building these, for events like the X Games, which moves from city to city every year and is often located on popular waterfronts or in downtowns for just a short weekend.

For a couple decades, most major skate/bmx competitions were like this, done in stadiums on temporary structures and ramps with brown, wood decking attached. But from time to time, some competitions would continue to happen at dedicated skateparks and in things like concrete bowls.

Last year I was surprised to learn something was so well faked I thought it was real, not once, but twice

Last summer, I was walking along the Ventura, CA waterfront, next to their fairgrounds, where I remembered watching the X Games competition the year before. I took a look around the grounds hoping to find some remnants of the X Games venues but I saw no sign of any of the pools or ramp parks from the event.

That makes sense if you've ever worked around a fairgrounds before, since they're mostly giant dirt lots that might house cars one week, goats the week after, and a ferris wheel a few weeks later in the exact same spot. They don't typically have more than just open land and empty warehouses scattered around.

For reference, here's what the Ventura fairgrounds venue looked like during the X Games in 2024:

It all looks convincingly permanent, right? There are buildings and concrete bowls and transitions and when you watch it on TV, the street venue looked like a miniature high school and the ramp venue looked like it had always been there, complete with multistory buildings.

But here's what it really looks like from the event crew's renderings:

It's actually temporary and built on scaffolding, which gets taken down days later.

The second time I was surprised by this was last August in downtown Portland, Oregon. I was there for the XOXO Festival, which had just ended, and I was having brunch with a friend at his hotel in Portland. We spotted a young woman holding a skateboard in the restaurant and I told my friend I'm pretty sure that's a pro skater eating breakfast before a major competition ( I didn't know one was taking place that day in Portland yet). Later on, I looked it up and she turned out to be the silver medalist in skateboarding at the last olympics, which was pretty cool.

I spotted more skaters outside, asked them where the comp venue was, and they said it was down at the waterfront, so I walked down to it.

I was met with a giant festival like atmosphere, complete with tons of bleachers surrounding street, park, and skate bowl settings. There were also giant LCD screens like you'd see inside a baseball stadium, showing live video from inside the venues.

I turned the corner and took this quick shot of the street section while people practiced before the start:

After a few minutes, I walked to the center, and saw the pool skating on the giant LCD screen, which looked like this:

It was at that moment I realized the pool wasn't being telecast from far away, it was actually around the corner, so I started ascending stairs built on tons of scaffolding as I tried to find a spot in the bleachers to watch them practice, then I looked down into the bowl.

And it hit me.

Holy shit, there's no actual concrete here.

But the water stains. The wheel marks. The "wear" on the pool coping. Nope, it's all painted on. Scroll up to look at the actual concrete Newberg skatepark photo that I took in 2004, and then look at the screenshot above from Portland.

It's so well done, it's WILD.

Even if it's fake, it's real

I'm so used to real skateparks being in every little town where I live in Oregon that it never dawned on me that for the last 5-10 years of watching televised competitions, I wasn't watching people riding actual concrete skateparks.

These temporary structures are coated in masonite, a sort of MDF wood and glue product that's thin and flexible, providing a great fast surface for wheels. But like MDF, it takes paint well, and all these "concrete" skateparks are simply painted on.

It's really, really convincing.

I don't feel cheated or duped, mostly just surprised. The paint process they put on the surfaces to look like concrete are so convincing that I naturally assumed they were taking place on real, permanent structures. TV does a good job hiding the behind the scenes aspects, so it wasn't until I was physically at two locations before it sunk in that nothing I saw on TV was real.

Honestly, it's kind of cool that things I thought I knew can still surprise me after all these years.