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Elissa Steamer: Pro Skateboarder Profile

For skateboarders, even when you’re good, you’re still bad. Even when you’re a professional, you’re still bad. In women’s professional skateboarding, Elissa Steamer is the best, but she’s still a skateboarder, and so that makes her bad.

“People in suits and nice clothes, they see me and they’re like, ‘oh, scum bag kid,’ or whatever,” said Steamer, who most recently won gold at the X Games and who is the only female skater in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater video game. “They don’t know that I’m 30-years-old and well off, you know what I mean.”

In San Francisco, where she makes her home in North Beach, Steamer says she gets kicked out of “everywhere” for riding her board—even the grocery store, to which she rides because it’s downhill from her home. The hills and the concrete are why Steamer moved to San Francisco in the first place. The city makes an excellent training ground, but it also means lots of the places she likes to skate are off limits. She says the police don’t care that she’s a professional. “They’re like, ‘oh, so you’ll have no trouble paying this ticket,’” she laughed.

Skateboarding is kid stuff, and Steamer is the first to admit it. She feels like she’s never outgrown the skater she became when she was 13-years-old. Which is a good thing, probably, considering most 30-year-olds would not for long entertain the idea of jumping a board on the metal guardrail of a dozen or so cement stairs. Even if they did, one fall would change that thought process quickly. But Steamer retains the recklessness that accompanied her adolescence. “I remember like a couple of years ago, I fell off like 10 stairs, smacked my face, harder than Mike Tyson could have hit me, and I just went, ‘alright, I guess I gotta go home now,’” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

She stands up, rolling her shoulders out of her grey blazer and tossing it onto the couch in an upstairs conference room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Pulling the sleeves of her shirt above her scar-ridden elbows, she details the destruction of her body. Knocked out teeth. Knee surgeries. She points, with painted nails, to the lumps in one of her hands. Old scar tissue that has failed to heal. Her shins, which she reveals by pulling up the hem of her dark blue jeans, are dented—pocked with shiny scars that are testament to her body’s ability to forgive and…remember. Steamer says she tore every tendon in her foot at the X Games in August, and it took two months before she was able to get on her board again. “It’s like, you get used to pain because you know it’s going to go away eventually.”

Steamer began skating when she was a little girl. She used to skate up and down the street on a plastic board in front of her family’s home in Fort Myers, Fla. But she didn’t get serious about skating until she was about 13-years-old. “Basically, what it was, you know, was a way to hang out with my friends,” she laughed. “Instead of hanging out and eating potato chips, we’d go skating, you know what I mean. And then eat potato chips later.”

Steamer’s family was supportive of her skating endeavors. She had an older sister who danced and entered beauty pageants. In other words, she did not skate. Her mother took Elissa to skating contests, basketball games and golf tournaments (Steamer says she loves golf still—it’s the only sport she doesn’t get mad about if she loses because “it’s so hard”). “My dad always kept a skateboard under my feet,” she remembered. “My birthday is in July, so I’d have a board for six months and get a new one for Christmas.”

Now, of course, she can afford her own boards. She turned pro when she was 22-years-old after dropping out of junior college. Steamer is part of Team Etnies, so when she wins a competition, Etnies matches the prize money. At the X Games, Steamer placed first in the women’s street competition (which includes stairs, handrails and ledges as opposed to a “vert” course which has a vertical ramp). Her gold was good for $2,000 in prize money. The male winner took home $50,000. Steamer admits the discrepancy is “kind of harsh.”
So what’s the average day like for Steamer? She competes in five or six competitions a year. On normal days, she sleeps in, wakes up, calls her skating buddies (mostly guys—she only sees female skaters at competitions) and they decide where they want to skate around all day. She doesn’t even have to work out regularly. She joined a gym once when she had injured her knee, but she stopped going because her arms were getting too big.

A huge sports fan, Steamer thinks the increased girls’ participation in skateboarding is a good thing. She even has an 11-year-old pen pal whom she met at the Gravity Games in 2004. Steamer met the girl and her family at the competition as part of a make-a-wish program. She invited them to dinner, and they hung out together in the athlete’s lounge…playing video games. They still write letters back and forth.

Steamer hopes to continue skating as long as she can. After that, she doesn’t know what she’ll do. She’s invested some of her money in properties, and so feels comfortable about her future and doesn’t worry about finding a new career. “Maybe I’d have to deliver a pizza every once in a while or something,” she joked. Doubtful. But if so, we know how she’ll be getting from house to house—that is, if the cops don’t arrest her on the way there.

By: Rebecca Beyer
Article courtesy of GoGirlWorld.org