I low key love her but I also have reservations based on her age and worries about safety and exploitation. For one, has anyone seen the video that was released last year of her fall? It was filmed, edited and designed by her parents. It shows footage of her skateboarding leading up to her fall, the part where she didn't make the jump between verts. Then it goes into slow-mo as she starts to fall, the panic of the person filming as the shot goes askew as they clearly run to her. Then it switched to ambulance noises and clips of stills of the ambulance/hospital. Then the video ends with Sky, a child in a hospital bed recovering from severe injuries, doing what amounts to a piece of professional, scripted presenting, outlining her injuries and how her helmet saved her and how she's be back skating asap.
It made me extremely, extremely uncomfortable to watch. While obviously the accident itself wasn't staged, her parents still worked hard to stage how it was released and create a narrative around it. And for for years and years, Sky has been skating without any safety gear and her parents have been deleting comments from anyone who questioned her lack of a helmet. So it all just comes across as so very, very false. I suspect the main reason she had a helmet on at that point in her training is because helmets are mandatory for the Olympics. Up until that point, her parents had very much being promoting an extreme sport to girls (and all children) as one they should do without safety gear. Because while they weren't explicitly saying 'don't wear helmets' little girls seeing this amazing athlete, doing her thing without gear, with her hair flowing in the wind, would have wanted to copy her.
I also question the wisdom of having anyone, especially a child, work on the kind of vert jump she was doing without crash mats between the verts. I would respect her parents so much more if they actually came out and acknowledged that they had been lax about safety before but that would change now. They still have so many promotional videos of Sky out there with no safety gear. If that was me, I'd be retroactively adding disclaimers on those videos to state they were before her accident and that they recommend safety gear to anyone she inspires to skate.
But even without the issues around her accident and safety gear, Sky is clearly a polished performer who's pieces to camera are extremely scripted and inauthentic. I question the whole story about how Team Japan was too intense and Team GB was more fun, so that's what made her parents feel ok about her skating with them. Because she clearly isn't a child who's skating ambitions and achievements are solely driven by her own sense of fun. She's someone who does a lot of carefully planned promotional work and it's not her planning that.
I fully believe she absolutely loves skateboarding. I fully believe she wants to be in competition, even as high as Olympic level. I fully believe she loves her training, wants to do it, and was fully determined to get back on her board after her accident. I don't think anyone has to push her to skate as she does. (Obviously I have no real clue but from what I see, it's what I believe.) But if she was my child, that would be my limit. She would do no unnecessary promotional work. No heavily scripted youtube/insta vids. No kids Dancing With the Stars shows. She could indulge in her sport to her highest level if she really wanted, as as much as possible every other moment of her life would be childhood. Because for one, I'd avoid making her sports-persona too much of her identity, so that she could always feel free to reassess her ambitions and walk away if she felt she really wanted to.
I don't know, it just makes me very, very uncomfortable. I discovered as an adult that I was very good at a sport I always loved watching. It was a weird feeling as I love being so good at something I always fantasised about but I know now that if I'd been training since I was a child I could have risen to a reasonably high level. I'm not saying I'd have been an Olympic qualifier/medalist or anything but I could probably have built a career around it, first as an athlete and then as a coach. It felt bittersweet for the first year or so knowing that in other circumstances my lifelong fantasy could have been a reality. But, once I really thought about it, I'm just so glad I had a healthy childhood. There is so much abuse of children with high sporting potential, and it seems to be especially true of girls. I don't believe Sky is being abused in those ways. But I can't say that I believe she isn't being exploited. I don't believe she's getting to make as much of her childhood as she can.
And while I don't know a huge amount about skateboarding, I have read speculation that there are certain moves she does, like landing a 1080 jump, the only female boarder to do so, that are actually easier for children. This isn't just true of Sky, there have been a number of major jumps achieved by children that it's possible may not be achievable by adults. And if that's true, pressure will start to mount on those children to stay physically as small and childlike as possible for as long as possible. Just like I believe was a problem in women's gymnastics?