A couple of days ago we posted up an opinion piece entitled “8 Action Sports that Deserved To Die”.
It was a piss-takey look at a series of action sports that (for better or for worse) have fallen out of favour, or whose heyday had passed.
Or that’s what we thought. Because it seems that some sports die harder than others.
The inclusion of barefoot water skiing, snow blading and the epic sport of “street luge” passed almost without a mention. But our assertion that rollerblading had died did not go down well.
Things started calmly enough…
…before progressing onto some (perhaps unintentionally) comic abuse, as rollerblade lovers started tagging in their mates.
But then stuff started to get a bit nastier.
Now we can take a trolling as well as the next site, but really?
Before too long, people were posting personal abuse to the author and links to his Facebook page exhorting people to hate on him further.
One commenter did back down and swiftly deleted his post when we called him out for “not playing nice” but this kind of thing was still there.
Thankfully, amongst all this there were some more considered comments too. And a few people posted videos to show us how great rollerblading was/is. Some of these were pretty hilarious…
But some were actually pretty impressive. If you’re into that sort of thing.
What all this fuss showed us is that to its aficionados, rollerblading still means a lot. And (perhaps because they’re used to taking abuse?) they will defend it to the hilt.
Of course there are also a lot of people who’d write it off…
But far from going the way of other 90s cultural signifiers (like Global Hypercolor T Shirts or light up LA Gear kicks) it seems there are a lot of folk out there who are still in love with their ‘blades. Who knew?
As to whether rollerblading is growing all over the world as some people were claiming, or about to make a glorious comeback, we’re a bit more dubious.
But you can’t deny people’s passion for it is impressive. So what do you think? Is rollerblading dead? Will it make a comeback? (Should we not even be calling it a comeback?)
Or does it just bring back uncomfortable memories of this…?
You may also like:
8 Action Sports That Deserved to Die – The Original ‘Offensive’ Article