Remco Erkeland travels the world, often together with his girlfriend, and he never forgets one thing: his skateboard. The 24-year-old Goirlenaar is one of the world’s top professional skateboarders and lives a dream life. This week he returned from Japan where he took a step towards his greatest sporting goal: the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
As a 12-year-old boy, he fell in love with skating when he went to watch the National Championships with his parents. He decided to get on a skateboard himself and it became a hobby that got out of hand. He took part in competitions for the first time at the age of fifteen and is now a full professional who travels all over the world thanks to several sponsors.
He often travels with his girlfriend Olivia van Kampen, also a skate pro. In recent weeks he was in Korea and Japan, where he mingled with the best skateboarders in the world. “Every year I skate between 30 and 45 competitions, all over the world. In Japan there was a competition for the Olympic ranking, although it will only count halfway through 2026.”
The Olympic Games have been the ultimate goal of Goirlen residents for years. The sport became an Olympic sport for the first time in 2020, and Erkeland hopes to be there in Los Angeles in 2028. “America is the skating country, the sport is huge there. In Japan I came 24th, and 36th at the previous Olympic World Skate Contest in Rome. The final ranking is being cleaned up, because there is a maximum number of participants per country. This means that I have pretty good credentials to make my dream come true.”
To be as good as possible, Erkeland trains every day. He does this with a trainer and physiotherapist in Tilburg, but he also looks for skate parks, indoor and outdoor. “I live the life I always wanted, but it is hard work and it requires a lot of dedication. During a training session, for example, I jump off a rail at a height of a few meters for an hour. My body has been used to it over the years of top sport, but it remains a sport with risks. I have suffered a serious injury to my ankle, for example.”
“People ask if I should get a real job.”
Skating regularly causes misunderstanding among people. “They underestimate the sport and ask whether I should look for a real job. There is also not always a positive response when we ‘just’ skate on the street. The environment is a playground for us. I understand that if you see me sliding over a bench in the neighborhood, it looks like I am demolishing something. But we don’t bother anyone, we do what we like. When people ask if we are leaving, we do so.”
How does a competition work?
In a competition there is first a qualifying round. Each skater gets two runs of usually 45 seconds, with the best one counting. “We can decide for ourselves where we start and end and which tricks we do. This is also the case in the semi-finals. In the final you can also make five attempts to show the most difficult tricks possible, some of which count.”
