The raddest thing about Andy “Rad Dad” Macdonald isn’t that he’s best friends with skateboarding legend Tony Hawk, who calls Macdonald “one of the most talented, hardcore skaters you’ll ever meet.”
It’s not the rad fact that Macdonald holds 23 X Games titles for his ability to soar through the air while grabbing, flipping and spinning his board and body on a vertical ramp in dazzling and dizzying ways.
It’s those rad moments during each skating session that Macdonald finds addicting. “A time in each aerial where you stop going up, but you haven’t started coming down yet, and it’s a split second of weightlessness,” he says. “It’s just the coolest feeling.”
It’s also not that Macdonald may be one of the only people ever to have skated across the marble floors of the White House — an invitation he accepted years ago to give an anti-drug speech on the hallowed grounds.
No, the raddest thing about Macdonald is that he’s a 51-year-old skateboarder who’s turned his teenage obsession into a bona fide career while bucking beliefs that skating is for young punk-rock outcasts and breaking the sport into the mainstream as the “Rad Dad,” basking in the time of his life at the Paris Olympics.
Macdonald calls it Peter Pan syndrome — his lifelong condition of refusing to grow up. So what if he’s in his 50s and still loves visiting skateparks, learning new tricks and riffing with the younger generation of skaters? It doesn’t feel all that long ago that he was a kid growing up in New England, riding a borrowed board across a basketball court. There was something about how the nine-inch plywood with urethane wheels glided across the pavement that felt like soaring on a magic carpet.
Macdonald begged his parents to buy him a board. If they wouldn’t let him play football, he reasoned, they could at least buy him a skateboard.
This was in the late 1980s, when skateboarding was gaining national attention, with skaters like Tony Hawk, Mike McGill and Steve Caballero awing fans. Even so, public perception painted skateboarders as outcasts who disrespected authority, used drugs, and vandalized public property while skating through parks, kick-flipping down stairs, or grinding handrails. It was no different in New England, where Macdonald was one of only a handful of skaters in a region where football reigned supreme.
While fans flocked under the Friday night lights, Macdonald built makeshift ramps along his driveway with snowbanks covered in plywood. He built a halfpipe with a neighbor. When the first indoor skatepark opened an hour away, Macdonald regularly rode the train to practice. He obsessively read skating magazines like Thrasher, which featured elite skateboarders shredding ramps in Southern California, the mecca of modern-day skating with its picturesque climate — there are no snow-filled driveways in San Diego — its outdoor ramps, and its home for sponsors and elite athletes.
It all felt like a different world than New England, with its prolonged winters, snow-packed streets, and lack of a skating scene. If Macdonald was ever going to make it as a skater, he knew he had to get to SoCal.
By his junior year of high school, Macdonald made up his mind: After graduating, he was moving to Southern California to chase his professional dreams. He’d shred the vert ramps, land all the sick tricks, and have his name reign above the greats like Tony Hawk.
Of course, this was all much to the dismay of his parents, who pleaded with him to go to college.
Sure enough, after graduation, Macdonald packed his Datsun station wagon — the one with the broken radiator he couldn’t afford to fix — with all his belongings, $500 in his pocket, and headed west.
Macdonald doesn’t fit the mold of a professional skateboarder — at least not the one that immediately comes to mind. He doesn’t use drugs. He never smoked. He doesn’t drink. He has no tattoos. His black hair — graying on the ends — is clean-cut. If he has one vice, it’s that he enjoys candy a bit too much, specifically Red Vines licorice. He says he was once blacklisted from Thrasher magazine for years because he didn’t fit the image of a punk rock professional skater.
But what he lacks in stereotypical looks, he makes up for in determination and stubbornness.
That’s never been more evident than in the six years Macdonald spent learning the McTwist. The move, invented by Mike McGill in 1985, features a 540-degree spin above the ramp — a rotation and a half — with a half-flip at the end.
Macdonald says he spent years trying, failing, and gaining the confidence to land such a daring move. He finally nailed it at a skateboarding camp in 1994 — six years after his first attempt — with a roaring crowd at a vertical ramp in the heart of Amish country in Pennsylvania.
“The feeling of satisfaction — of finally doing this thing that you literally put years of blood, sweat, and tears into — is a feeling that not a lot of people know,” Macdonald says. “Skateboarding teaches a lot of lessons that you can apply to life in general: self-motivation, self-discipline.”
When Macdonald entered Southern California, he had maybe $50 to his name and a broken radiator he had learned to manipulate. If he blasted the heat inside the cab, it drew heat away from the engine. That was fine in New England’s cool climate but made for a brutal drive through the Nevada desert.
Once in SoCal, Macdonald skated at every opportunity at public parks. He slept on friends’ floors and picked up odd jobs to pay the bills. At one point, he was so desperate he thought he was a lock for a job at Taco Bell — but he didn’t get it. Instead, he settled for a job at SeaWorld, walking around the park dressed as Shamu after the previous actor was injured when a kid tackled him.
But on his skateboard, Macdonald was proving himself, culminating in a 1993 world championship. (Today, he has 10 world titles to his name, none of which people care about, he says.)
Macdonald never dreamed of qualifying for the Olympics because the thought never crossed his mind when he first picked up a skateboard. In fact, the Olympics were the antithesis of skateboarding in the ’80s. Skaters didn’t abide by rules, wouldn’t be judged by anyone but their friends, and weren’t conforming to carefully crafted teams aiming for gold.
But a lot has changed in the decades since.
Macdonald was a founding board member of USA Skateboarding, the governing body for Team USA, as skating became a sanctioned Olympic sport. NBC had recently bought the rights to the Olympic Games, and seeing the success of snowboarding during the Winter Games, officials hoped skateboarding could equally capture the Summer audience.
Macdonald was ecstatic watching the sport reach such heights, hoping it would level the playing field while eliminating favoritism based on sponsorships.
“Skateboarding,” he says, “for the first time in history, was a global phenomenon.”
Unfortunately, he says, the Olympic Games came with their own politics, so he stepped away. Instead of steering the sport from the top, Macdonald chose to qualify as an athlete, even though he was approaching 50.
As an athlete, Macdonald could show firsthand how “skateboarding is a community that knows no bounds.”
“No matter your age, you can participate — it has no limits for inclusion. You can be young, old, male, female, Black, white,” he says. “It’s skateboarding. We all identify as skateboarders. And it’s the most fun thing I know how to do.”
With his options limited with Team USA, Macdonald discovered he could qualify for Britain’s national team under his father’s citizenship. It wasn’t an easy path, but chasing goals never is.
Qualifying was a two-year process with competitions held across the globe. He met skaters from India and Uganda, an eye-opening experience that highlighted how much skateboarding had grown.
“Britain paid for our training camps, insurance, room and board, and flights to Shanghai, Hungary, Dubai, Argentina and Brazil,” Macdonald says. “Which was a blessing because my sponsors weren’t going to pay for that. The only way I could do it was if I made the national team.”
Macdonald secured his spot during the final run of the last qualifying meet in Budapest, Hungary. Known throughout his career as “Mr. Consistent” for his smooth and reliable routines, Macdonald had to live up to his name more than ever. He had crashed during his two previous runs and knew he had to deliver “the hardest, most difficult, most technical run I can possibly do.”
Macdonald bailed in both of his earlier runs while attempting a heel flip. A third unsuccessful attempt would have ended his Olympic dreams, but if he wanted to stand any chance of qualifying, he had to land it.
And he did! Macdonald picked up more speed and went higher on his final run. Though his board didn’t flip as intended, he managed to grab it, plant his feet, and land solidly — an equally impressive feat in its own right.
“Because it’s skateboarding, the judges don’t dock you for that,” he says. “They were like, ‘Whoa! He should have fallen, but he didn’t.’”
The run was enough to send Macdonald to the Olympics for Great Britain. He rode a train to Paris to celebrate his 51st birthday.
Macdonald was clear about his goals for Paris: to have the most fun. He didn’t care about scores or placing — he had already won gold in his mind.
“I learned later that I got 18th place, but I didn’t care,” he says. “It was more about the experience of getting to represent Great Britain and the opportunity to showcase skateboarding as a whole on the world’s biggest stage.”
These days, skateboarding carries a different public perception, straying from its punk rock roots — an image Macdonald works to uphold.
Recently, there was a competition at a vert ramp in Orange County near Macdonald’s home. Among the divisions was Legend, a class dedicated to skaters aged 60 and older. Macdonald wonders how long he’ll keep skating. He’s already been at it for more than three decades. Could another 30 years be in the cards?
“If I can inspire another kid to pick up a skateboard, or if I can inspire another adult not to put one down,” he says, “I’m gonna keep doing that.”
There’s plenty rad about that.
