The 49-year-old skateboarder who crossed paths with dragons on 4-wheeled odyssey to 2024 Olympics

PARIS (AP) — Of the 10,500 athletes at the Paris Olympics, skateboarder Dallas Oberholzer is surely the only one to have crossed paths with dragons on his four-wheeled round-the-world odyssey to the 2024 Games.

The 49-year-old from South Africa had to go to the jungles of Peru to find them. There, under a shaman's watchful eye, the grizzled traveler who also competed at the Tokyo Games that marked skateboarding's Olympic debut, placing last in the men's park event, tapped into the psychedelic powers of ayahuasca, a plant-based brew that indigenous peoples in Latin America have long used for healing and rituals.

Sure enough, the hallucinations came thick and fast: a jaguar, an anaconda, falcons, vibrant colors and, yes, those fiery beasts that put the roar into “Game of Thrones.”

“I saw dragons! I was flying with dragons. I was underwater with the dragons. I was lying basking in the sunshine with the dragons, charging up," he says.

“It’s not a party,” he adds. “I had moments like I felt like I was being ripped apart.”

After years of hauling his skateboard around the world — or, perhaps, being dragged around by it and the adventures it takes him on — Oberholzer's hope was that his inward journeying last year would help reset him for what is a monster challenge on the threshold of the Big Five Zero: competing on Wednesday in the giant Olympic bowl against skateboarders not even half his age, who soar to heights he cannot attain.

Only 51-year-old Andrew Macdonald of Britain is older. At the other end of the age spectrum, the five youngest boarders — 16-year-old Viktor Solmunde of Denmark; 17-year-olds Keefer Wilson of Australia and Gavin Bottger from the United States; and 18-year-olds Hampus Winberg of Sweden and Alain Kortabitarte from Spain — still don't add up to the 100 years grand total of Macdonald and Oberholzer.

The elders — Oberholzer and Rune Glifberg of Denmark, both 46 then — finished at the back of the pack in 2021 in Tokyo, where 18-year-old Australian Keegan Palmer uncorked a particularly spectacular trick to win gold.

Oberholzer's prospects don't look any better in Paris.

“I've kind of accepted I'm going to come last. It doesn’t matter to me,” he says.

Still, the rolling stone with a shaggy, salt-and-pepper shoulder-length mane thinks it's essential that his generation is still in the Olympic mix. Oberholzer is concerned that Olympic acceptance is chipping away at the sport's rebel soul, driving a chase for medals, not life journeys.

“In the next few Olympics it’ll be nothing more than a bunch of 14-year-olds. So we sure as hell better enjoy the last few editions of the old-timers,” he says.

“We paved the way. We did. And I don’t want to give it up to some kid that is, like, regimented in a gym," he adds. “It’s scary because skateboarding was always about the freedom and about the expression and the deviance of skateboarding, you know, and doing it your way."

Roughly a year out from the Paris Games, Oberholzer was feeling the hard mathematics of age and a vagabond skateboarding life that, he says, has left him financially broke. He rented out his Cape Town flat to help finance his globe-trotting for qualification points. After Paris, he wants to spend time with his girlfriend in Dubai but says he doesn't have money for the visa. He has no sponsors.

“It’s midlife crisis, man,” he says. “I got a bit jaded and a bit broken by skateboarding. I mean, it hasn’t been very rewarding financially. And it was essential for me to just make peace with it, with it all, and to reset.”

Hence the ayahuasca.

He says he emerged from the Peruvian jungle “supercharged" and, big plus, also free of his marijuana habit — which is a non-negligible bonus when you're being drug-tested at the Games.

“My peers have all noticed my skateboarding is improving and that’s all I really want — to improve my personal abilities in skateboarding. And it just shows that you need to work on your mental health and, yeah, just dig deep and go out there and explore.”

His immediate goal now: impress his mum. She's coming to Paris, with his sister.

“She says I got to have that one magic trick, and I’m still working out what it is,” he says.

“That’s about the only pressure I feel right now. Once again, I’m not going to get a medal. I just got to be my personal best. And, yeah, maybe it’s also just doing it for the old geezers out there. ... Inspire a few people to step back on a skateboard or never give up.”

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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games