“Just 21, [Torres] is known as the bad girl of skateboarding. The table-flipping, golf-cart-stealing, cigarette-smoking, trash-talking, school-quitting, home-leaving, contest-winning kind of outlaw who can board-slide a knob-welded rail,” said her local newspaper The Orange County Register in 2007.

She may sound like a , but Vanessa was super talented from a young age. Balancing school and skating got too much, so she quit when she was 17 and moved to Southern California.

Before long she had won the very first Skate Street event at the X-Games and joined Lyn-Z and Elissa as skate video game characters!