Meet Sky Brown, 13-year-old Team GB skateboarder going for gold at the 2020 Olympic Games

The Japanese-born Team GB skateboarding sensation has just celebrated her 13th birthday, and will be 11 days into her teenage years when the opening ceremony launches the hotly-anticipated Olympics into the spotlight.

The most impressive part? She is not just making up the numbers, she is not jetting out to the far east because no-one else would, she is a genuine gold medal prospect in skateboarding – which will make its debut at the Olympic Games in Tokyo this year. Sky Brown is on the verge of superstardom.

RadioTimes.com caught up with Brown from her home on the US west coast, a sacred land for the sport, around the launch of 'Reaching the Sky', an exclusive discovery+ Original Series documentary out now.

"I can't wait. I'm super excited. I'm excited to be in the Olympics and see how it is." Brown speaks with the innocence and excitement that a 13-year-old on the brink of the Olympic Games should be feeling, especially after her big moment was thrown into jeopardy following the postponement of the event due to COVID-19.

"I was definitely shocked. It came out of nowhere and I was really bummed and sad. But people's lives are more important than my dreams. My dreams are tiny compared to people's lives. I really want to help people."

She added: "Honestly it was kind of nice though, to spend time with my family, spend time at home and just get better. It gave us all time to progress. And we're going to put on a better show at the Olympics.

"Lots of people will enjoy watching skateboarding – it's super exciting. The sport is really exciting and beautiful.

"It's almost like a dance, but you're going high and getting lots of speed and you never know what people are going to do. They just kind of pop up in all different kinds of places, get so big and it's a really cool sport to watch.

"I love watching people doing airs. They're so pretty. When they go high, they can, like, tweak it and make it look beautiful. Everything in skateboarding, I think, is really beautiful."

For all the beauty that skateboarding can produce, Brown is all-too familiar with the ugly consequences of pushing hard.

In 2020, she suffered skull fractures and broken bones in her wrist after landing head-first off a ramp during practice. At the time, she was 11. Just over a year later, she has fully recovered but is very much aware of how close she came to a fatal accident.

"It was very bad. It was a very hard time. It was really bad. I heard if I moved a little differently that could have been it – I could have died." She emits a nervous laugh, her adoration of skateboarding and the potentially lethal nature of engaging in it are held in constant tension.

"It was a really bad time. I couldn't see my brother the whole time and it felt so long when I was in the hospital too, even though it was for like a week or something. I got out of the hospital really fast. I got really lucky, I recovered super fast and I'm so thankful.

"Now I'm feeling better than ever and honestly, it made me want to go harder. It made me feel like I missed a little bit of time. I had a plan, like what I wanted to do. It was hard, but it made me a better person."

Recovered, refocused and raring to go, Brown is gearing up for the culmination of a lifetime's work – though that life did begin just weeks prior to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Born in Japan to a Japanese mother and British father, she has split her time between her homeland and the US, but will ride for Team GB in the Games, an honour that is not lost on her as she puts the finishing touches to her preparation.

"Home is honestly Japan. I was born there, I lived there for a long time, I speak Japanese, but England is home, here [in USA] is home. I feel home in all places. It's pretty cool.

"Representing England is so cool, and especially knowing that the Olympics is going to be in Japan, in Tokyo. I feel like I can bring the countries together, if that makes sense?"

She threatens to be the breakout star of the Games, not only from a British perspective, but objectively across the board – she ranked third in the Park event at the World Championships in 2020.

A further year has afforded her time to develop, to grow, physically and mentally, to add more fuel to the tank and dig deeper into her box of tricks. Sky Brown is going for gold.

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