A Quote by Brian Boitano

On the lip of the Grand Canyon. I've always wanted to do that. My very first TV special out of the Olympics was on a glacier in Alaska. Right after that one, I went and pitched this idea to skate in three National Parks. Like Voyageurs National Park, because it freezes over and you have these little islands that you can skate around. [The networks] were like, 'Way too expensive.'
You never know when you're gonna come across a sick skate spot, or a skate park you wanna stop at, so as long as I'm not injured, I'm always gonna have my board on me, and my skate shoes, and whatever I need to go out there and get a little session in.
My family was lower middle class, and my parents both worked, so we couldn't take proper vacations. We'd go for three days to Santa Barbara or to the desert, so my first real vacation came was when I was 12, when friends of my parents were taking their kids away. We went to Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Park in Arizona and Utah.
Nearly every president in the past 100 years has declared national monuments, from Teddy Roosevelt creating the Grand Canyon National Monument to George W. Bush preserving 10 islands and 140,000 square miles of ocean waters in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
As a Canadian it's something you grow up with. Where I'm from in Canada the ground usually freezes in late October and the lake is frozen until late March. We learn to skate at a young age and I learned to skate when I was three. I was on an outdoor rink when I was three-years-old.
I love skateboarding because it's the funnest thing on earth. And that goes for, not only if you're one of us about to skate the Olympics or just a kid out there skating your skate park, just having fun. It's the freedom, the love. It brings us all together and the nonstop challenge and the progression.
All our old record reviews were like, 'Oh, these skate punk kids, blah, blah, blah.' And I don't skate, and we're not skate punks.
My parents never pressured me to skate. They always said I could quit if I wanted to. They only expected me to skate when they had already paid for the expensive lessons. But, otherwise they said I could do what I wanted to do.
Kids at skate parks will step up and challenge me to a game of Skate, but I'm over that, I really don't care. I'm all about participating, and I'm all about being a part of this scene, but there's certain vibes I just don't get along with.
I hung out with all the guys in my neighborhood when I was little... I would, like, skateboard and go to skate parks, like, every day and do motor cross, like, every weekend, and I was kind of one of those girls.
She's quite skinny, like me, but nice skinny. Roller-skate skinny. I watched her once from the window when she was crossing over Fifth Avenue to go to the park, and that's what she is, roller-skate skinny. You'd like her.
The media was, 'Oh my God, you're gay,' and I'm like yes -- I've been out my whole life to my family and friends. Everyone in the skating community knew. But just because I won the national title, it's like, 'Oh, my God, you're gay.' The judges would say, 'You have to tone down your costumes, your choreography,' and I'm like, 'No . . .' I wanted to skate for the audiences, not for the judges.
All the coverage of skateboarding sucks. They couldn't care less when it comes to how skateboarding is portrayed. All I can do is portray it the right way when it comes to me. So skateboarders can look at what I'm doing and say, "Yeah, the only person doing it the right way is him." That's why Street Dreams was so important in being 100% true to skate culture. That's why the Wild Grinders are important in showing the different styles of street skating. That's why I get involved in building the skate parks. All I can do is show skateboarding the right way.
There was a very important superintendent of Yellowstone, a man who was involved in the founding of the National Park Service itself, Horace Albright. And he became superintendent, which is the boss of Yellowstone Park, in 1919 - from 1919 to 1929. Later, he was director of the park service itself. Albright embraced the idea that in order for the national parks - and Yellowstone in particular - to have support from the American people and from politicians, there needed to be wildlife as spectacle.
If you're going to photograph skateboarders you can't run after them, you've got to learn how to skate. So at about 50 years old I learned how to skate, and skate fast enough to keep up with them and hold my camera.
I always felt stupid at the skate park. Everyone else is just wiping out and getting hurt, but they didn't even have helmets and knee pads - and I'm over here looking like some kind of marshmallow. I felt so ridiculous.
The first year I started hockey, I didn't know how to skate, so I got on the ice with all of the hockey players, and we were doing drills where we had to go backwards in figure eights. And I could not skate, and I just kept falling on my butt, and it was very embarrassing.
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