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Darren Miles never thought he would compete in any sport for Britain. But in October, he will represent Great Britain in slalom skateboarding – a form of downhill racing – at the World Skate Games in Paraguay. Last week, he completed his World Anti-Doping Agency awareness training. He had to tick a box confirming: “I’m an international athlete.”
“Justification” is the word that comes to mind, he says. “A feeling that I haven’t wasted my life skateboarding, that diverging into something new” – he took up slalom in his late 50s – “and working hard at it has yielded a result of which I am very proud.”
“It’s now a personal ambition,” he adds, “to do my best. See who I can be.” A new feeling for someone who has lived with “all my light under a hundred bushels”.
What he doesn’t often hear, he’s pleased to say, is: “Aren’t you too old?”
Miles is 60 now, but he used to get asked that all the time when he was a teenager, skating to the shops or on the ramps where he lived in Colchester, Essex. His mum gave him a skateboard when he was 10; his aunt worked in the manufacturing factory. “We were the first generation of British skateboarders. And we didn’t know how long you could skateboard for. We just did it because we could do it,” he says.
He pulls the little orange board his mother gave him out from beside his desk; it’s one of seven boards he keeps at home in Plymouth, south-west England.
Miles has used a skateboard for almost his whole life – in his 20s, he skateboarded alongside his job repairing cameras, and in his 30s, while he went to university to study ocean science. He could ollie (a jumping technique) on to a handrail and slide down it, and he once skateboarded the legendary pipeline under the Mount Baldy reservoir in California. In his 40s, he continued to skateboard while working as a consultant specialising in flooding. He now manages flood risk for the local council.
But a few years ago, he began to sense his world diminishing. “The amount of people I knew was shrinking.” And his flexibility was deteriorating.
During Covid, taking his skateboard to the local park, he realised: “I would slowly be unable to do these tricks, one by one.” He completed a “quite basic” trick – a 180-degree turn – and a stranger voiced an appreciative “Yeah!”
“‘Oh, no!’” Miles thought. “‘This is a grim glimpse into the future’ … They were impressed that I was an old person doing an easy trick. That didn’t sit comfortably with me.”
Having sat a while with “the pain of my lost youth”, he made a conscious decision to take up slalom. He has had to learn new ways to move his body, and how to build momentum while changing direction between the cones on the racecourse. “You have to pump through. It’s unexpectedly physical … You’re always judging, relearning what you’re capable of.”
Managing speed and sharp redirections – the course sounds like a lifetime in miniature. “It’s a surprising amount that happens in 15 seconds,” he says.
Slalom appealed because Miles believed “there must be an element of learning at the beginning”. An upward curve, “where you get better”. For anyone who enjoys skateboarding, it’s “a surprising way to extend your skateboarding life”. He mentions Tony Alva, the American skateboarder who will turn 70 next year.
Slalom has also enlarged Miles’s circle of friends. “Racing has a habit of forging close friendships in a short time,” he says. He’s raced in Cambridge, London, France, Germany, and trains at an annual slalom camp in Czechia.
Occasionally he still dreams of skateboarding the ramps, as he used to, “when you carve up and you float – weightless, that’s a very seductive sensation”. Slalom carries the risk of banging his head or breaking a collarbone; competitors move so fast, they don’t know they’re falling until they land.
But it’s the “upbeat and positive” attitude of slalom that appeals to him. “You can’t imagine not making it. You have to visualise yourself rolling out of the course.
“I find it amazing what humans can learn to do with enough time and commitment.”
