Finding Fan Favorites: Super skateboarder Amelia Brodka deserves our attention
Amelia Brodka is one of USC’s greatest trailblazers.
The pro skateboarder’s legacy is remarkable and should make her one of the most celebrated athletes to graduate from USC. Yet, the average USC sports fan has probably never heard of her.
So, how has an icon gone unnoticed?
Her achievements should command our attention. A skateboarder since she was 12 years old, Brodka started competing in professional skateboarding events in 2007 while she attended USC. Ever since then, she has ranked well in international vert, park and bowl competitions. She is a two-time winner of the European Park Championships in 2017 and 2018. Most remarkably, she qualified for the women’s park event at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games, representing her home country of Poland. In doing this, she became the first USC alumna to ever compete in the Olympics for skateboarding.
Her achievements in competition are enough to cement her status as one of USC’s most iconic athletes. However, her achievements in the greater sports world are even more impressive.
Brodka’s senior thesis was one of the most impactful in USC’s history. Her short film, “Underexposed: A Women’s Skateboarding Documentary,” shined a light on gender disparities within skateboarding and won awards at multiple film festivals.
In 2012, the same year she graduated from USC, Brodka founded Exposure Skate, a nonprofit organization that attempts to expand the space for women in skateboarding by empowering female skaters and providing them more opportunities to compete.
Within the first few years of the organization’s existence, Exposure created the world’s largest women’s skateboarding event, Exposure: A Women’s Benefit Event, which remains one of the largest skateboarding events to this day with more than 170 women and girls participating annually. The event’s proceeds go towards ending domestic violence.
Exposure also holds free monthly events for girls from ages four to 18, where attendees focus on a community service initiative before a skating clinic. Last year, Brodka also founded an Exposure College Scholarship program, inspired by her belief in the importance of higher education like the one USC provides.
So, Brodka has carved up the skatepark and carved out a place for women in a traditionally male-dominated sport. She is one of the biggest icons in all of women’s sports and a leader for women’s rights.
So, why hadn’t you known about her before reading this article?
The answer is the exact same reason that Brodka has fought tooth and nail to give female skaters a platform.
Brodka, like most women skaters, has dealt with being overlooked by her male peers long before she was an Olympian. Women are often shunned in the traditionally male-dominated sport of skateboarding, and Brodka isn’t a stranger to excessive male intimidation.
Due to its dangerous nature, skating has long been seen as a sport for men, fueled in part by stereotypes about the increased physical toughness of men compared to the supposed physical weakness of women, which quietly led to a “boys’ club-esque” culture that permeates throughout the sport. Women have had little opportunity to prove that skateboarding was for them too.
Until recently, at least. Until Brodka.
The number of women skaters has increased drastically, coinciding with the emergence and success of Brodka and many other successful women skaters.
Brodka has proven that she is physically and mentally tougher than all the boys who used to make her feel unwelcome at the skatepark. She has endured the physical toll of skateboarding and the mental abuse of naysayers with an unmatched grace and fire and has fought to ensure that other women and girls don’t have to endure the difficulties she did as one of the first women to professionally compete in a “boys’ club” of a sport.
Yet, the biases against women skateboarders still exist, and they are still very prominent in the minds of sports fans. That is why, despite all of her achievements in the sport of skateboarding, Brodka is not a household name in the minds of sports fans.
We shouldn’t forget one of the most impactful women’s athletes in the world. Luckily, we don’t have to. We can address our unconscious biases against women in skateboarding and recognize Brodka as the icon that she is.
Members of the Trojan Family and the greater sports world, I implore you to pay attention the next time that our own Amelia Brodka competes or her organization runs an event. She is a showstopper in one of the most extreme and entertaining sports on the planet.
And, just by paying attention, you’re helping fight for gender equality and redefine an entire sport. How cool is that?
Ethan Inman is a freshman writing about exceptional USC athletic alumni who are relatively unknown despite their achievements. His column, “Finding Fan Favorites,” runs every other Thursday.