【推荐1】Skateboarding can be traced back to the 1950s in America, where West Coast surfers started attaching wheels to wooden boards in order to “surf” on land. It became popular in the 1960s, with stars from Clint Eastwood to Katharine Hepburn pictured trying their hand at the sport. In 1965, ABC televised the National Skateboard Championships, which saw international skaters battled it out for a prize of $500.

In Japan, the All Japan Skateboard Association, founded in 1982, helped to gradually introduce the activity through surfing centers. Skater Taiichiro Nakamura, better known as “Chopper”, got his start in skateboarding in the late 1980s at the age of 15. When he was young, Chopper’s father always encouraged him to pursue an unconventional career, so Chopper practiced skating hard, eventually turning his hobby into a profession.

With his slight build, Chopper never thought he’d reach the same level as international skaters. So with many of his American counterparts(对手)pursuing bigger “air” and increasingly ambitious aerial(空中的) tricks, Chopper stuck close to the ground and pursued original street skating instead. He involved himself in his tricks with a sense of fun, inventing moves like the “potato roll”.

“Chopper made people realize that skateboarding isn’t just about copying other people’s styles,” says Hayate Kamimura, who skates with the Osaka Daggers and works as an instructor at a nearby skate park. “It’s about how you bring out your own creativity and invent a style that nobody else has.”

In the past, Chopper didn’t have many people to skate with. Now the sport has come to mainstream acceptance in Japan thanks to the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games, in which skating was included. However, there still aren’t enough skate parks where people can skate without disturbing others. If you skate on the street, you have to share that space with people walking by, who will get the impression that skateboarding is noisy, dangerous or scary.

【推荐3】I loved weightlifting and began to do that at 12 years old. During my first year of high school, increased the amount of training and put everything into my dream to one day compete internationally. Unfortunately, I was not a naturally-gifted athlete. But I worked hard. When I was a senior in high school, I won two national championships and earned nine national-level medals in all.

However, I didn’t make it to compete for Team USA. I didn’t meet the requirements for the IWF Youth World Championships team and was later an alternate(侯补者) for the Pan-American Youth Championships team. I struggled to accept the fact that I never achieved the one goal I worked for during the last four years, representing Team USA internationally. I lost the passion I once had for the sport and took a step back from competing for a few months.

After I started college, I once again came into contact with barbells(杠铃) during my PE classes. Once I touched the barbell again, I just wanted to continue lifting weights and see how far I could physically and mentally push myself. I decided to start training full-time again to see what I could achieve during the rest of my college years.

I stopped caring about the weight on the bar, the girls I was competing against and the idea of being on Team USA. I started focusing on being confident and consistent with every lift-training with consistent weights on the barbells, skills and positive self-encouragement. Training and weightlifting became a competition with myself, rather than with other weightlifters.

During University Nationals 2022, I represented Temple as a university student. It was the first competition in my eight years of competing where I felt confident during every lift. The work I put into the six minutes spent on the lift paid off in every way. Later, I became a 2022 All-American athlete and finally made my first international team.