Andrea Andersson Antunes from Skate Malmö initiates us to the Swedish girls’ scene and gives insights to the ‘Get Set Go!’ girls street comp

Interview by Hannah Bailey

Skate Malmö collects together the skate scene in Malmo. It’s your complete guide to skateboarding in Malmö. Our local skateboarder organization, Bryggeriet, is behind it together with the city of Malmo.

The skate scene for girls in Sweden is really good. It’s getting better and better, bigger and bigger! When I started 10 years ago there weren’t that many girls, but we’ve worked really hard to promote the scene over her.

The aim: to get more and more girls to skate! We have ‘No Limit’, an organization especially for girls that skate in Sweden. We go on tours, camps, competitions and everything. We’ve collected together all the girls from different cities and we really come together on it all.

I want it to be as usual for a girl to skate as it is for a guy. It shouldn’t be a problem being a girl. There’s still a lot of work to do, some girls are still afraid as there are a lot of guys at skateparks. But it’ll get better when we get more parks and it becomes open for everyone.

Come skate! Here in Malmo every Monday night at the indoor skate park we have a special time for only girls. That’s one thing we do. But so much other stuff! Like competitions (e.g. Get Set Go!) and a lot of camps. We have a local crew, Tösabidarna. We skate. We do whatever we feel like doing actually, like play basketball or ping-pong. Stay together, support each other and we’re really open to new girls, just come skate with us!

We’ve been running ‘Get Set Go!’ for three years now, together wit Malmö Ultra Bowl, on the street course of Stapelbäddsparken. But actually you could say that it all started four years ago, when we had a mini ramp contest for the girls. At that time we hadn’t set the name for it yet, but it was also a really cool contest. Lucy Adams won and there were more girls who really ripped the mini ramp!

This year it felt like the ‘Get Set Go!’ contest exploded! 25 girls from all over the world were here and everyone seemed to have a really good time, to say the least. The sun was shining, the girls were ripping and everyone had a smile on their face. I can’t wait until next year!

There’s so much to love about skateboarding! Everything from cruising around to learning a new trick, you meet new people and see new places. I just found a new favourite park! There’s always something to do! I really like the fact that it’s so individual and everyone can do their own thing on their own basis, but still together.

I’ve built my life around skateboarding. I’m kinda nerdy that way. When I truly like something, I get so devoted to it, I want to keep on doing it. I work at Bryggeriet skatepark and this summer I’ve been working in Stapelbäddsparken everyday and then I stay in the park to skate almost every night.

If I wasn’t skateboarding I would probably dream about trying to do a dance or maybe a ping-pong career. Well it doesn’t matter, as long as I’m doing something that I love!

We were in Malmo last month for Ultra Bowl IV and specifically the girls street comp, ‘Get Set Go!’. 28 girls from 9 countries were expected to compete and we went to check out the action on our own board and chatted to Andrea, organiser of ‘Get Set Go!’ and an important part of the crew over there…