Arisa Trew

Arisa Trew: Two and a Half Revolutions, No Fear

She made a deal with her parents: if she won Olympic gold, they would buy her a pet duck. On 6 August 2024 in Paris, Arisa Trew won the women's park skateboarding final at fourteen, becoming the youngest Olympic champion in Australian history. She got the duck. In the space of fourteen months she had also become the first woman to land a 720 in competition, the first woman ever to land a 900, and the winner of a Laureus World Sports Award — a sequence that redrew the technical ceiling of women's skateboarding while she was still in school.

Cairns to the Gold Coast

Trew was born on 12 May 2010 in Cairns, in tropical far north Queensland, to a Japanese mother, Aiko, and a Welsh father, Simon. The family moved to the Gold Coast when she was two, into the strip of southeast Queensland that has become one of the densest concentrations of skateparks in the world. She started skateboarding at seven.

There is a persistent piece of misinformation attached to her that she has cheerfully encouraged: she is not related to Ruby Trew, the other Australian Olympic skateboarder who shares her surname. They are close friends, and they tell people they are cousins as a joke.

The 720

The first indication that Trew was operating on a different technical plane came in 2023, when she was thirteen. In May she finished fourth in women's park at the Japan X Games. Then, on 23 June at Tony Hawk's Vert Alert in Salt Lake City, she landed a 720 in competition — two full aerial rotations — becoming the first female skateboarder ever to do so.

The significance of that requires a moment of context. Vert skating rewards a specific and unforgiving combination: enough speed and height off the ramp to buy rotation time, and enough spatial control to know exactly where the ground is while spinning through 720 degrees with a board that must stay attached to your feet. The women's ceiling had sat at 540 for years. Trew moved it by 180 degrees in a single trick, in competition, at thirteen.

The following month at X Games California she won gold in both women's vert and women's park — the two disciplines requiring different terrain, different lines and different risk calculations.

The 900

In March 2024 she finished fourth at the World Skateboarding Tour event in Dubai. In April she was given the Laureus World Sports Award for Action Sportsperson of the Year, one of the sport's most prestigious global honours, at thirteen.

Then, on 29 May 2024, she landed a 900 in a half-pipe: two and a half rotations, and the trick that has functioned as skateboarding's four-minute mile for a generation. No woman had done it. Trew was fourteen.

In June she won her fourth consecutive vert and park golds at X Games Ventura. In August came Paris, the Olympic final, and gold — an outcome that made her Australia's youngest Olympic champion in any sport, in a country whose Olympic history runs deep enough for that record to mean something.

After the Gold

The pattern of prodigies who win an Olympic title early is that the following season deflates. Trew's did not. At the 2025 X Games in Osaka she set the record for the most X Games skateboard gold medals won by any girl or woman, and tied a run of four consecutive women's park titles. In 2025 she was appointed a Medal of the Order of Australia for service to sport, having already been named Emerging Athlete of the Year at the 2024 AIS Sport Performance Awards.

Why Arisa Is Called a Genius

The word applied to Trew is about a physical and perceptual capacity, not an intellectual one, and it should be said plainly. What she has is exceptional air awareness — the ability to track her body's orientation in space during multiple rotations without visual reference for most of the trick, and to arrive at the ramp with her board underneath her.

This is a real cognitive skill, but a narrow one. Landing a 900 means completing two and a half revolutions in roughly a second and a half, during which the rider cannot see the landing for most of the rotation and must rely on proprioception and an internal clock. The consequences of getting it wrong are physical injury, which means the trick also demands the ability to override a strong survival instinct — repeatedly, in practice, for months, while failing. What makes Trew unusual is not simply that she can do it, but that she got there before her body reached adult strength, and that she has done it across two disciplines, park and vert, that reward different skills.

The counter-case matters. This is craft and nerve, not intellect, and calling it genius risks flattering the word. The field is also small: women's vert skateboarding is a discipline with a limited competitive population, which means being first to a trick is partly a function of who else was attempting it. Her Olympic gold came in park, where she is dominant but not untouchable — she finished fourth at two international events in the eighteen months before Paris. Skateboarding is brutal on bodies, and a fourteen-year-old landing 900s is accumulating impacts on joints that have not finished growing; the sport's history of early-peaking athletes is not encouraging. What is genuinely, verifiably exceptional is that she moved the technical frontier of an entire discipline twice, in thirteen months, before she turned fifteen. Nobody in women's skateboarding had done that.

The Long Run

Trew will be eighteen at the next Olympic Games — an age at which most park skaters are only entering their strongest years, and by which she will have held an Olympic title for four of them. She already holds an Olympic title, a Laureus award, the X Games record for gold medals by a woman, an Order of Australia medal and two tricks nobody of her gender had landed before her. The question that will define the rest of her career is the one the sport asks of everyone who peaks early: whether the frontier she moved twice can be moved again, by her, after her body and the field have both caught up. She has a duck, a decade, and a very high floor.