Skateboarding in Chennai

When five friends Nagaraju Bandapalli, Naresh Bhukya, Sehkar Yadav, Anjaneyulu AB and Rakesh B meet, things are always ‘in motion’ as they come on their skateboards. 

Skateboarding is extremely popular in other countries like USA, Mexico and Brazil. Recently a foreigner on RK Salai was spotted gracefully moving around cars when the traffic stood still and when there was no place to move, he picked up his ride and got moving by foot. 

These five enthusiasts want to popularise the sport in Chennai and they have started a club and invite enthusiasts for regular meet-ups. 

“I had gone to Mexico and the sports scene is completely different. During the weekends, an entire stretch is blocked for sports enthusiasts to do different activities.

I saw some people do gravity-defying stunts with their skateboards and I wanted to do bring something like this in Chennai,” says Nagaraju, who managed to gather like-minded friends from different IT companies and take the hobby seriously. They meet every Sunday morning to different public places. 

On February 14, they gathered at a stretch of road in Thoraipakkam. “Currently, we use only cruiser skateboards and it is used to manoeuvre only. There is a different kind of skateboard to do stunts. We mostly practice on tarred roads. A different kind of road surface is required for doing stunts. It is not easy to find such roads in Chennai. 

However, we have found one place at the Marina Beach, where we can do stunts as well,” he says. These skateboarding lovers learnt the sport from YouTube and plan to promote it through social media platforms. “We post details about our upcoming events and venues on social media. 

We have around 70 followers but only a few turn up for the event. We plan to reach out to school kids so that they learn about it at a younger age,” he says.