What a 68-Year-Old Skater Going Viral in China Tells Us

A 68-year-old skater known online as Grandma Liu became one of China’s feel-good viral stories of 2025, and not as a novelty act. Liu, who lives in Chengdu, took up skateboarding in February 2022, at 65, after trying a board at her daughter’s urging. She fell constantly at the start the way anyone does, picked up the minor injuries that go with that, and kept going anyway — always in protective gear, because a fall at 65 does more damage than the same fall at 25. Clips of her carving confidently through a local park, posted to the account her daughter set up for her, spread far beyond her own modest following: netizens nicknamed her “Chasing Wind Girl”, her most popular clip drew more than 42,000 likes, and the story was picked up by the South China Morning Post and CGTN.

I run a group whose entire purpose is getting adults through the specific fear of showing up at a skatepark for the first time in decades. When a video like Liu’s circulates, I notice it directly: new members mention it unprompted, the same way they mention a friend who skates or an article they read. That’s worth taking seriously as more than a feel-good story — it’s doing real work on a barrier that’s otherwise hard to move.

The barrier isn’t physical, it’s social

Almost nobody who hesitates to start skating at 50 is hesitating because they doubt their body can learn to balance on a board. They’re hesitating because they’ve never seen someone who looks like them doing it, and a part of their brain is running a simple, usually unconscious check: is this something people like me are allowed to do in public?

That check runs on evidence, and until recently the available evidence for most adults was thin. Skate media has spent decades built around teenagers and twenty-somethings. If every visible skater is forty years younger than you, the honest answer your brain gives to “am I allowed to do this” is no, whether or not anyone’s actually told you that.

Liu isn’t alone in shifting that evidence. Earlier this year a 65-year-old grandmother in Weihai, in eastern China, went viral skating alongside her 43-year-old son and 14-year-old grandson — three generations on boards in the same clip. Dong Zhiying had been skating for a little over three years, which puts her first push at about 62. Judi Oyama, Juanjo Urbizu, and others this site has written about separately are part of the same pattern: a growing, genuinely global library of footage showing older people, and specifically older women, skating well. Each one on its own is a nice story. Together, they’re slowly rewriting what “normal” looks like at a skatepark.

Representation isn’t the same as motivation

It’s worth being precise about what a viral clip actually does, because it’s not quite the same as inspiration. Inspiration tells you a thing is possible in the abstract. What Liu’s videos and the others like them provide is closer to permission — direct visual proof that someone who shares your demographic profile, not just your enthusiasm, is already doing the exact thing you’re afraid to try. That’s a narrower and more useful kind of evidence than a generic “you can do anything” message, because it answers the specific social-acceptability question rather than the general confidence one.

This matters most for the group least represented in skate media historically — older women. Women over 40 picking up skateboarding have historically had the thinnest visual evidence to work from of anyone in this audience. Every additional viral clip of a woman well past 40 skating confidently narrows that gap a little more.

What this actually changes at the park

None of this makes the first session back less physically demanding. It doesn’t replace learning to push, balance, or fall safely. What it changes is the specific, acute anxiety covered in our piece on first-session imposter syndrome — the sitting-in-the-car, certain-everyone-will-stare feeling that has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with whether you believe you belong there.

Someone who’s already watched a 68-year-old confidently carve a park in Chengdu, or a grandmother skating with her grandson in Weihai, walks into that first session with a quieter version of that fear than someone who’s never seen anyone over 30 on a board. The skating itself is the same either way. The permission to try is not.

You don’t need millions of views to use this

You can use the mechanism without waiting for a new viral moment to land in your feed. Seek out footage of skaters who look like you — your age, your gender, your body type, your starting point — on purpose, the way you’d research anything else before trying it. Follow a few adult or older skaters instead of only the top competitive names. Join a local group, even a small one, where you can see the same “someone like me does this” evidence in person rather than on a screen.

Grandma Liu didn’t set out to change anyone’s mind about who’s allowed on a skateboard. She just kept skating after she fell, enough times that the clips her daughter posted found an audience far beyond the park. That an account with around ten thousand followers ended up in international news coverage says less about her specifically and more about how much pent-up demand there was, worldwide, for exactly that kind of proof.