PARIS — If you want to see the best park skateboarders on the planet, you can visit any of the dozens of public skateparks across San Diego County. On any given California day, Tom Schaar or Tate Carew or Keegan Palmer or Jagger Eaton might appear at Poods in Encinitas, or Prince Park in Oceanside or Krause Family Park in Clairemont.
Or you can poke your head into the California Training Facility in Vista, built by the company that designs Olympic facilities as an indoor incubator of talent.
Or you can just go down the street to Gavin Bottger’s backyard. Everyone is there, too.
Technically, it’s an enormous swimming pool without water. It did have water for about a month last spring while the plaster cured, but they quickly drained it so 17-year-old Gavin, the reigning world champion in the park event, didn’t need a snorkel to prepare for the Paris Olympics.
It is the ultimate backyard practice facility, ranging from 6 to 10 feet deep, six times the size of a regular residential swimming pool with a 60,000-gallon capacity.
“The pool is bigger than my house, basically,” Scott Bottger, Gavin’s father, says. “It looks like a lake in the backyard. I look out my bedroom window and it’s like, ‘Holy hell, I really did it this time.’ I could have a pet Shamu if I wanted to.”
But it’s more than that. The ambitious project in North County, and their journey there to nurture Gavin’s prodigious talent, has come to symbolize the region’s stature as the sport’s global epicenter.
“Gavin’s bowl is really fun,” says Ruby Lilley, a 17-year-old park skater on the U.S. women’s Olympic team. “It’s awesome.”
Lilley is from the area, too. Pretty much everyone is. The top five men’s park skaters in the current world rankings all live in the county, making a San Diego medals sweep a real possibility in Paris. One is Australia’s Keegan Palmer, the gold medalist in the sport’s debut at the Tokyo Games in 2021. The other four are American, and the United States is allotted only three Olympic spots in each event.
Eaton, who moved to the area from suburban Phoenix specifically for the skate culture, was ranked No. 2 entering the final Olympic qualifier last month in Hungary. He slipped on his first run of the semifinals and bruised his rib cage, then fell on his next two runs as well and didn’t advance to the final.
Tom Schaar, who was No. 5, needed to finish first or second in the qualifier to pass Eaton and claim the final spot on the U.S. team with Bottger and Carew. He finished second with a couple scintillating runs. Eaton dropped from No. 2 to 5 in the world rankings and fell just short in his bid to become the first person to qualify for an Olympics in both park and street disciplines. (He’s going in just the street event now.)
“Yeah, it stung,” Eaton says. “There’s no other way around it. It sucked. At the same time, do I think the USA got the three best guys? Yeah, I do. If Tom is willing and able to do that under pressure, he deserves that spot.
“Yeah, it sucks. But at the same time, USA is stacked and I’m expecting medals. Let’s (bleeping) go.”
In all, half of the 12-person U.S. team (and four of the six park skaters) live in San Diego County. Palmer and four other local residents will represent other nations in Paris. Dozens of others regularly come through the area to train, to bask in the Southern California sunshine, to soak in the aura of Tony Hawk.
“Everyone is within 10, 15 miles of each other,” Schaar says. “It’s crazy that we’re all in the same area. There are 10 skateparks within 20 miles of where I live, and they’re all really, really good. And there are so many of other good skaters that you’ll see everywhere, so it pushes your level of skating.
“I’d rather skate with my friends than alone or not with other people. You feed off each other. You see someone doing something, and it pushes you to do something new. It’s like a snowball effect.”
Schaar grew up in Cardiff and attended San Dieguito Academy. So did Bryce Wettstein. Lilley is from Oceanside. Carew went to Point Loma High School. They were all born into the culture.
Bottger wasn’t.
He grew up in South Lake Tahoe, the son of a snowboarder from East County who moved to the mountains to chase backcountry powder and worked as a roofing contractor when the snow melted. There were a couple subpar skateparks in town, and Gavin dutifully learned how to snowboard at age 4 instead.
When Gavin Bottger was 5, Scott arranged a trip down the mountain with another family to a skatepark in Carson City. On the way home, Gavin asked his dad if they could do it again sometime. Scott shrugged. Sure.
“In my mind, I’m thinking maybe next weekend,” Scott says. “The next morning, it’s 6, 7 in the morning, he taps me on my shoulder, he’s hanging over me and his eyes are wide open like he’s eating a bowl of sugar. He goes, ‘Dad, can we go skateboarding?’ I said, ‘Right now?’ ”
They drove back down the mountain to the skatepark. They did it 72 days in a row.
“It has not stopped since,” Scott says. “The train has not stopped.”
During the winter, they’d drive to Bay Area skateparks and sleep on an air mattress in the back of their Subaru Outback.
When Gavin was 8, they came to stay with family in San Diego for a few months to experience the skate culture. Gavin grew up idolizing Schaar, watching his videos on the megaramp. Now he was skating alongside him.
Soon, they were house hunting.
“We made the trek to support my dreams,” Gavin says.
They settled on a place in Oceanside off Highway 78 that had a big backyard and erected a 5-foot vert ramp. But a neighbor living behind them kept filing noise complaints, and Scott realized the 1,600 square foot ramp was twice the allowable size for a residence. The neighbor won. The ramp was removed three years ago.
That got Scott thinking. Why not build a legally permitted backyard swimming pool, then drain it? He’s a contractor and has worked construction. He could do a lot of it himself.
“We had a not-so-nice neighbor that made life difficult on me,” Scott says. “He was calling the cops on us all the time. I had to move the ramp, but I was like, ‘Now I’m going to build a pool.’ I had a mountain of dirt in my backyard. We had an army of dump trucks. I mean, it was insane. I didn’t realize how much dirt comes out of those things.
“I’ve got plans. I’m building more stuff. I’m making my whole backyard skateable. I’m going to build a volcano-style fire pit that you can skate, too. We’re going to have a viewing deck with a BBQ and bar.”
The pool was drained a few months ago, and Bottger immediately invited the San Diego skating community to his backyard.
He didn’t have to. Gavin could have used it as his private training ground to secretly perfect new tricks ahead of Paris.
Why not?
“That’s an easy one,” Scott says, answering the question. “Because skateboarding has given us so much. This amazing journey and life we have, it’s literally the most epic thing we could ever dream of. And the relationships that I have with my son, traveling around the world with awesome people having these great experiences, this is my way of giving back to the skateboarding community that’s given me so much.
“I want to have everyone there. Yeah, it’s at our house and it’s for Gavin, but it’s for everyone. Skateboarding is a family-type deal. That’s why.”
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