She heard all the rumors, but Nicole Hause wasn't ready to believe it. It just seemed unlikely to her that an ages-old, tradition-bound event like the Olympics would actually welcome skateboarding.
"I was like, 'Nah, it's not going to happen,' " said Hause, from Stillwater. "A year and a half ago, when they said it was in, I was like, 'Are we sure about this?' It took me a while to figure out that it was for sure. And it still seems crazy that it happened."
With skateboarding officially on the program for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Hause wants to take the next step: making sure she's included in the Summer Games, too. A member of USA Skateboarding's first-ever national team, she returned to her home state this week to compete Friday in Women's Park at the X Games. The four-day, multisport event starts Thursday at U.S. Bank Stadium.
The contest will be only the second for Hause this season as she continues to recover from a serious knee injury. While she's still regaining consistency with her current tricks, a group of young skaters — including four prodigies from Japan — is adding impressive new ones to their arsenals with more haste than usual.
Misugu Okamoto, who just turned 13, currently is the only woman who can land a well-executed 540: flying up off the lip of the wall and spinning 1½ rotations in the air. Hause will be working on 540s herself and expects she'll be performing them soon. With skateboarding making its Olympic debut a year from now, she knows she can't afford to stand still.
"Our sport is progressing really fast," said Hause, 21. "What people see the guys doing in [the X Games] is similar to what the girls will probably be doing by the Olympics. Not with as much power as a 6-foot dude, but similar tricks. And I can't even imagine what the dudes will be doing.
"Some people don't want to go outside their comfort zone and learn new stuff. I think it's cool. Our sport is all about progression, and this makes you progress at a faster rate. It's all about working hard and trying to catch up with Japan."
Hause placed ninth in last year's world championships in Nanjing, China. She returned to that city in mid-July for an Olympic qualifying event and finished 23rd to pick up her first Olympic ranking points of the year.
The United States can qualify up to three skaters of each gender in each of the Olympics' two events, Park and Street. Athletes must participate in a set number of qualifying events in 2019 and 2020. Those with the highest point totals will be named to the Olympic team.
Hause got back on her board only three weeks ago, missing the first Olympic qualifier in June because of a rare type of injury to her left knee. What she thought was simple swelling and pain from a fall in training was actually a Morel-Lavallée lesion, a condition that occurs when muscle or other subcutaneous tissue tears away from the connective tissue just under the skin. Because it damages blood vessels, it can lead to infection and even gangrene if not promptly treated.
In Hause's case, the tear involved the quadriceps muscle above her knee. "Part of my muscle is not attached there still," she said. "It takes a while for the blood vessels and everything else to get back to normal. It might take a year, it might take less, but I'm about 90 percent [healed] at this point."
At last month's International Skateboarding Open in China, Hause was able to do tricks she hadn't done in four months. The X Games will give her a fresh chance to gauge herself against the world's best, in a competition she expects to preview the Women's Park contest at next summer's Olympics.
The favorites will include three Japanese teenagers: Okamoto, Sakura Yosozumi and Mami Tezuka. Okamoto currently leads the Olympic qualifying rankings, with Yosozumi second and Tezuka eighth. A pair of preteens — 10-year-old Kokona Hiraki of Japan and 11-year-old Sky Brown of Great Britain — also are among the standouts in the 12-skater field.
With the Olympics pushing the pace of progress, Hause expects the advances she will make over the coming year will equal what it would have taken two or three years to achieve in the past. She will return to her home base in Oceanside, Calif., after the X Games to put in more training, then compete in the world championships in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from September 10-15.
Hause said the progress in the other big component of her sport — performing with style, speed and height — is even more impressive than the upgraded tricks. Though she won't have anything new to unveil Friday, she's counting on her personal flair to entertain the 150 relatives and friends who will be at U.S. Bank Stadium.
"I'm going to try to put on the best show I can," she said. "At the end of the day, this is a big TV show. So whatever you can do to stoke out the crowd, that's what X Games is all about."
