This 15yo skater is on a roll and has the Olympics in her sights
It was Hobart teenager Grace Cochrane's competitive streak that led her to entering her first skateboarding competition.
Key points:
- Skateboarder Grace Cochrane got into skateboarding via an all-girl skate group in Hobart
- She is the first recipient of a Tasmanian Institute of Sport scholarship for skateboarding
- With skateboarding making its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020, Cochrane would love to make the Australian team
Little did she know she would be stepping on the path to potentially becoming a Olympian.
"A lot of my friends that skate were doing competitions, and I'm quite a competitive person, so I thought I'd give it a go," she says.
That decision is beginning to pay dividends.
"I went in my first international competitions this year. I'm hoping to continue that this year, and you never know what happens from there."
The 15-year-old Taroona High School student recently finished 22nd in the park and bowl category at the recent World Championships.
Today, she became the Tasmanian Institute of Sport's (TIS) first skateboarding scholarship recipient, joining a group dominated by cyclists, rowers and hockey players.
"This [scholarship] helps a lot because it helps get me around Australia," Cochrane says.
"We don't have a lot of facilities here in Tasmania to help develop young skaters, so to be able to travel around the country and around the world definitely helps a lot.
"Hopefully, it encourages other skaters, and girl skaters especially, to strive to be the best skaters they can be."
Cochrane credits the local all-girl skate group for introducing her to the sport.
"There's a group based at Elizabeth College Skate Park called She Shreds which is all really inclusive and supportive," she says.
"I heard about it and decided to go along and loved it."
Her inclusion to the TIS is a strategic one.
With skateboarding having been accepted into the 2020 Tokyo Games, Cochrane has been identified as a potential Australian representative after achieving a top-six national ranking.
'As a parent, it's not easy to watch'
Cochrane's mum Miranda Harman never thought her daughter would be an Olympian but has no doubt she can go all the way.
"I still wince a bit, but not as much as when she first started out," she says.
"It's not the easiest sport for a parent to watch.
"She's resilient. She works really hard at it. She's determined. She's always been a kid who would get up after she'd fallen down and try again."
TIS director Paul Austen says the decision to award Cochrane a Tasmanian Institute of Sport Scholarship is representative of the changing face of Tasmanian sport.
"When I started skateboarding wouldn't have been a sport we'd be looking at," he says.
"It's exciting and good for the staff to look at different techniques, different strength exercises we might need to do and to learn a completely different sport away from the rowers and the cyclists that we normally work with."
And skating might just be the tip of the iceberg as sport continues to evolve across the globe with even computer gaming considered a possible candidate for the Olympics.
"Certainly not yet, but in the next 10 years it'll be interesting to see how e-sports will be integrated into the Olympic Games. Some people are saying its going to happen, but I'm not so sure," he says.
In all, 111 athletes received TIS scholarships, across talent development, high performance and associate categories.
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