These three friends belong to the same skating group called the WOLF SKATING RING. Elabraham Egbeyemi, Olayinka Akinsanya aka Iperu and Emmanuel Osae a Ghanaian. They discover talents; groom them for a good cause. Pick young kids off the street and help them channel their energy to a positive use. Naija Follow My Skateea had a chat with Elabraham, the leader of the group about his love for skating, the benefit of skating and the way forward taking into consideration some of the challenges faced by the pioneers who started the sport.


NFMS.... WHY DO YOU LOVE SKATING?
ELABRAHAM... I’ve always loved the idea of rolling, the idea of going on wheels. I love driving; it just gets me out of funny moods. Put me behind the wheel, take away money, take away food, and please give me wheels.
So, imagine you discovering that you don’t have to get behind the steering to experience the thrill that comes with driving. Imagine you strapping something to your leg and you are able to hit the speed of a vehicle without the stress of having to buy fuel, Can you feel it? It’s that thrill that has kept me going on skate.

Let’s paint a better picture, at one time or the other, we’ve all craved the idea and imagined flying. The only thing that has gotten me close to flying is skating. I mean, if you are going at 60km per hour or more on wheels and it’s not because you are attached to an engine. But you are using your leg to achieve that speed. You experience, the breeze blowing pass you, music playing in the background. And you gliding smoothly on the road moving past people, the experience for me have brought me close to flying.

Look at the environment I live; skating is a rare recreational sport. It’s not what everybody does. So, people are always amazed every time I skate by. To them, I make skating look so easy, like it’s not as dangerous as they think it is. That attention in itself makes me feel like a super-being with talent.

NFMS...WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?
ELABRAHAM... There is no better way to earn money than to live your passion. A lot of people tell me to be careful on skate, that in fact, I should stop it ‘cause it’s dangerous. But if I had listened to them, I wouldn’t have been able to break as much records as I have broken till date. There is nothing in life that is not dangerous, haven’t you seen somebody who chokes trying to eating? The act of eating as simple as it is, can be dangerous too, sometimes. So skating like any other sport has its own dangers but the truth is, the benefit of skating surpasses the dangers you can ever think of.

There is nothing you do for pleasure that won’t bring money in for you. Look at big brands today; they didn’t start out as profit making ventures. They were just people who love to do the things they love to do and eventually, people started patronising them.

I love skating, and over time I’ve brought a lot of people into doing it. Now it has started paying me. I didn’t initially start skating cause of the financial returns but whether I like it or not, it’s bring in money for me. In a week I can get 4 different jobs. The least of these jobs fetch me about 7k a day. Think about that for a month. The financial reward of skating in itself is enough to be like what should sensitize anybody into doing it.

The pleasure in skating can’t be over-enumerated. It helps your cardiovascular exercise, and it helps tone your skin and muscles. It excite your brain, it makes you more productive. When you are skating, it’s like you are flying. You just enjoy the fun of gliding through the air. It clears your mind and makes rooms for your mind to be able to build on other ideas and goals.

It’s been 10 months since I started skating; it’s not a year yet. But yet, in the local government where I live, I’ve been able to inspire more than two hundred people to start skating. Some are still skating and some had to drop cause of one thing or the other. I am looking forward to a skating generation, a period when everybody in the city owns a pair of inline skate. When this time comes, we will discover that movement is easier. So many times when I go out, I get caught up in traffic and I see people cursing, angry and sweating because there is no alternative. But what I do in such situation is: I reach for my bag, pull out my skate on and simply get out of that jam. Irrespective of how bad the road is, when you are so good you can glide on any of them. Take it from me; the benefits of skating far surpass its dangers.

NFMS...MOVING FORWARD....WHAT ARE YOUR EXPECTATIONS?
ELABRAHAM... In the next 5 years, I want to have a skate company that will be use to run a big time courier service that is fast, efficient and cheap. There are so many times that parcels don’t get to their expected target because of factors like transportation, time and accessibility. With skating, we can avoid some of these challenges. Am not competing with other big courier service, this is just within Lagos.

Secondly, I want to create a kind of big competition for inline skating. The beautiful thing about skating is the speed. Now I want to have an inline skate competition where thousands of people will gather and watch what we can achieve with skating that the human leg can’t achieve. The competition will reward this skill in skaters.

It is a good way to pull the young people off the street. Off the boredom that leads them into negative activities.


NFMS...SKATING SHOULD BE MORE THAN 8 YEARS IN NIGERIA NOW; WHY DO WE STILL HAVE A LIMITED NUMBER OF PEOPLE SKATING?
ELABRAHAM... From what I have gathered, skate has been in Nigeria for close to 8 to 10 years. But so far, it’s been subtle, it’s not been pronounced. I ask myself what has the pioneers been doing all this while? Despite the fact that it’s a recreational and attractive sport, why are people not so into it yet? But then I figure that maybe they’ve not been able to deal with issues like:

Getting skate as a sport to achieve State recognition through which you can engage the young people. When you get the state government to support skating activities, they can deploy its resources into the sport and thereby, affect young people positively.

They’ve not seen skating as what it really is. They still see it as something they can own for themselves. Something they can brag on and make money from so long they can own and control it. They’ve not seen the sport as being owned and controlled by so many people.

They’ve not seen skating as language that can be use to reach the anomalies in the environment. Examples are: the issue of obesity, emotional stress, inferiority complex. These are anomalies in people’s life that affect our society.

Take a look at somebody who is suffering from emotional disturbance, they can take on skating as a good diversion. Cause eventually skating will build their self-confidence. Emotionally, you will be stable.

For inferiority complex, you don’t have to envy anybody who is good at something; you too can pick up skating and learn to be a pro. When you are good at it, everybody around you starts to appreciate your talent. Soon, you will be the sport-light.

Now, people who pioneered skating in Nigeria have not seen skating as a tool they could use in that regard. If they had, and communicated it extensively to people, they would have been able to pull more people in, than they are currently pulling.

NFMS...WHY INLINE SKATING AND NOT SKATE BOARDING?
ELABRAHAM... There is this belief that skate boarding is riskier than inline skating. But the reverse is the case. Reason being that, there are certain things you can’t achieve with skateboarding, but with inline skating.

If you go on skateboarding, to pick your speed you need your other leg. So, the ride is broken once in- awhile to pick up speed. But with inline skating, you just flow, with wheels attached to both legs. When one leg moves, it picks speed, and vice versa.

We also have to consider the road for skateboarding. Mind you, it’s not like we have the perfect road for inline skating too, but we can still make do with it for inline skating. Skateboarding is not attached to your leg, so you can’t easily manoeuvre your way around.