Skateboarding: How Many People Ride Goofy?

I started skateboarding recently and the first thing I had to figure out was how to stand on my skateboard. The standard advice is to find your dominant foot and make that your back foot on the skateboard. So, for example, if you normally kick with your right foot then that’s your dominant foot and you should put your right foot on the back of the skateboard. If your left foot is your dominant foot, you should put your left foot on the back of the skateboard which leaves your right foot on the front of the skateboard.

The stance where you have your right foot in the back is known as the “regular” stance. The stance where you have your right foot in the front is known as the “goofy” stance. So with the standard advice, all right-foot dominant people should be riding “regular”.

I am right-foot dominant but I ride goofy and the standard advice sounds crazy to me. When you are starting out, balancing is the most difficult thing and your front foot is doing all the work! So shouldn’t your dominant foot be in the front doing most of the work?

I was curious to see if other people shared my experience. So I wanted to see how often do right-foot dominant people actually end up riding the regular stance.

So how can we do this? Well, according to this meta-study, 12%-23% of people are left-footed (depending on how you count ambidextrous people). So if most people are right-footed and if we suppose most people follow the standard advice then we would expect only around 23% of people to ride goofy (since the right-dominant people would be riding regular and the left-dominant people would be riding goofy). If we find a lot more goofy riders, then many right-foot dominant people are ignoring the standard advice.

So how can we find the distribution of goofy/non-goofy riders? Well, World Skate is the governing body for skateboarding and it maintains data on the currently ranked skateboarders around the world. I was able to pull and analyze the data on 610 globally ranked skateboarders.

Here is what the distribution looks like:

Out of the 610 professional skateboarders, 291 ride regular and 329 ride goofy. This means that 53% of skateboarders ride goofy and 47% ride regular! Way more skateboarders than expected ride goofy. We were looking for as many as 23% and we have twice as many which shows that many right-foot dominant people are not following the standard advice (like me!).

Additional Nuances

One thing I noticed when I was watching the Olympic finals in Men’s Street Skateboarding was that every single finalist was a goofy rider! This was not true for the other skateboarding event (Park) nor for the Women’s Street competition. So I wondered if the goofy/regular distribution changes depending on additional characteristics.

Event Type

Street events emulate street skating by having gaps, stairs, and rails available on the course. Park events focus more on bowls, ramps, and quarter pipes. At the pro level, very few skaters compete in both (out of 610 skaters only 11 skaters competed in both).

Here is how the distribution looked by event type:

There is a 6% swing between the two events! It’s hard to tell if there is a real variance or if it’s just noise. One possible systematic difference between the two is that Park skaters are more likely to have learned skating via training programs as Park skating needs access to more things like bigger ramps and transitions. So if Park skaters are more likely to get started via training programs then they are more likely to learn the standard recommendation of putting your dominant foot in the back.

Age

I wanted to see if there was some trend with younger skaters learning differently but I don’t see an obvious trend here (except for 24-year-olds rebelling hard against the 25-year-olds).

Country

A lot of countries have their own skateboarding subcultures so I wondered if there was a difference across countries. So I looked at all the countries with at least 10 pro skateboarders. Here they are ordered by Goofy percentage:

US and Brazil have the most skaters and are kinda holding the balance with a 50/50 distribution. Japan and Australia have the next highest representation and are very regular. UK and South America (Peru, Colombia, Argentina) are leading the charge on the Goofy front. They have a lot of company, as most countries have a slight lean towards goofy riders.

It’s weird that the goofy percentage has an abrupt drop from the 50s to the 30s. I wonder if the bottom 6 countries have stronger systematic influences that either discourage goofy riders from becoming professionals or from new skaters experimenting with goofy skating. So instead of seeing a natural spectrum, we see a larger gap in between.

Gender

Men are 5% more likely to be goofy riders. Interestingly, the study I mentioned earlier also showed that men were 4% more likely to be left-dominant or ambidextrous. So a big chunk of the difference could be explained by men being slightly more likely to be left-foot dominant.

Caveats

A big assumption I am making here is that professional skateboarders are a representative sample of all skateboarders. However, it’s possible that in the real population, there are fewer goofy riders but the few goofy riders just tend to be more successful and are over-represented in the professional group. Though…if that’s the case, the starting advice looks even worse! The people ignoring the advice are fewer but are becoming so much better!

Regardless though, the takeaway here is to skate however you want. You have a lot of company either way!