It's a Saturday afternoon at Switch Plaza skate park in Shenzhen and the place is packed. More than 50 skaters from the mainland, Hong Kong and abroad have gathered for the Free Jam.
Part-competition, part-promotion party, the Free Jam is a sign of the sport's growing popularity on the mainland. Watching fans drink cold beers as skaters whiz past in different directions, launching off ramps, riding rails and grinding in the bowl, while passers-by crowd the footpath.
'It's gotten so much better in recent years,' says Andrew Guan Mu, assistant director of Switch Plaza and founder of China's first skateboard website, kickerclub.com. 'More people are getting involved and skate parks and competitions are popping up all over the place. Kids are going pro; they get salaries and sponsored equipment and clothes. Five years back, none of us could have ever imagined this.'
Although the efforts of mainland skaters and local brands underpin the sport's growth in China, global promotion by major international labels such as DC Shoes also give it an enormous boost. Quiksilver staged high-profile stunts such as skateboard professional Danny Way's 2005 jump across the Great Wall from a giant ramp, and sporting goods company SMP opened the world's largest outdoor skate arena, a 12,000 square metre complex in Shanghai, the same year.
'We felt skateboarding start to take off in China in 2006. Foreign brands started to pay attention and more overseas pros came to ride,' says Grace Bao Xinwei, director of mainland sportsgear firm Challenge Skateboards, which makes Boiling Point among other labels.
'It's hard to get a real number [on the number of skateboard enthusiasts] because lots of new kids are picking up the sport all the time while others slowly fizzle out but we estimate that there are at least 10,000 dedicated skaters on the mainland,' says Jia Wei, Challenge assistant director.