HUMANS OF AISTS
MAS2021 | Ep10 | Tianyu Lin
Yo, ready for some adrenaline rush? If you don’t go downhill, you can’t keep it real.
Sport has always been on the leisure side of my life until I came across downhill longboarding when I was working at Alibaba. Its irresectable charisma that is almost a meditation experience at velocity, hit me by heart immediately, and I decided to do something about it.
The next thing I know, I am sitting at AISTS with the crazy ambition to grow downhill longboarding into an Olympic discipline. Soaking up lectures revolving Olympic movement, governance, anti-doping, and other aspects that would never come up in a corporate context allows me to gain an alternative perspective of sports development.
So far, this journey has been amazing partly because AISTS provides an invaluable network where I get to meet influential organizations and personnel in the sports world, partly because Switzerland is so beautiful to live in. Moreover, yes, almost every local resident you meet here does sport – how amazing is that.
Fortunately enough, Covid has not impacted us as much as other sports, predominantly because it is an individual sport – even though we ride in flocks, it is still a pursuit of one’s own inner peace. Moreover, our playground exists mostly in nature – the mountain roads. So yea, despite the lockdown, we still get to skate in the magnificent Alps in Switzerland.
Our sport is still relatively new, all thanks to the material science from the 00s that made special design deck, truck, and wheels possible. Given the hardness, steadiness, and balance between traction and sliding, riders are able to spike the wind. The best of us has made a jaw-dropping world record speed at 143 km/h.
Watch our triumph event in Kozakov, Czech Republic, on the Olympic Channel:
A quick tip at the end, please wear protection when you try your first descending!
Are you riders ready?
*Credits for the Humans of AISTS go to Aditya and Gabor for coordination and photography!
