The History of Aggressive Rollerblading

Aggressive rollerbladers use inline skates to perform various tricks on rails, curbs, half-pipes of different sizes and other surfaces. There are three recognized styles of aggressive blading including park, vert and street. Since it's emergence in the early 1980s, aggressive rollerblading, or roller-skating, has grown as an extreme action sport.

  1. Early Roots

    • Although aggressive skating didn't begin until the year 1980, inline skates have been around since the first recorded invention in 1760 by Belgium's John Joseph Merlin. Merlin created his skates using small, metal wheels in a single line. The skates were meant to be a publicity stunt for Merlin's local museum. The use of wheels in a single line are definitive of the current inline rollerblades used for aggressive inline roller-skating. In 1819, M. Pettibled of France patented the first inline roller skate. Despite inline roller skates having a strong history, quad skates, or skates with four wheels arranged in two lines, were the most widely produced and distributed until 1980.

    Free Skating

    • In the late 1980s people began the first attempts at aggressive rollerblading. Skaters would take to the streets, wearing inline skates and attempting various tricks. This was known as "free skating". As time went on, free skating turned into more aggressive inline skating, with participants grinding, doing jumps and even flips.

    Alteration of Skates

    • In the early 1990s, BMX driver Jess Dyenforth decided to alter his inline skates to achieve better functionality for aggressive inline skating. Dyenforth's alterations made it easier for rollerbladers to grind the wheels against a pole, a trick often performed by BMX riders and skateboarders. The changes to inline skates also propelled aggressive skating into the realm of extreme sports and added to the sport's popularity. In 1993 a company named Senate was the firsts to mass-produce anti-rocking wheels, originally developed by Dyenforth.

    The X-Games

    • The X-games are an annual competition for extreme sports. In 1995, aggressive skating was accepted as a competition category in the X-games, furthering the popularity of the new sport. Aggressive rollerblading was divided into two events for the X-games: vertical ramp and the street course. Vert is a skating term that applies to aerial tricks. Street refers to any tricks done on a street, using items such as rails and steps. The X-games removed aggressive skating as an event because of a decline in popularity in 2005.

    Aggressive Rollerblading in the Present

    • Aggressive rollerblading still exists today, and many professional aggressive skaters belong to the Aggressive Skaters Association. The ASA was developed in 1994 and serves as a league of extreme sports athletes. In 2010, the ASA began traveling around the world as a part of the Action Sports World Tour. The tour is a competition among skateboarders, aggressive rollerbladers, BMX riders and FMX participants. Aggressive skating is not as mainstream as it once was, but it still a valid part of the category known as extreme sports.