Judi Oyama has been the world's oldest competitive female skateboarder for two years running. This week, Guinness World Records confirmed she has stretched that title again, this time at 66 years and 25 days old, based on her run at the 2025 International Slalom Skateboarding World Championships in Brazil last November.
The Santa Cruz, California, native picked up a homemade board from her brother as a teenager in 1973 and turned pro just two years later. Her discipline is slalom — weaving down a closed course studded with cones at speeds that can hit 30 to 40 miles per hour, built more for precision and nerve than for the vert-ramp tricks more familiar to casual fans. She was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2018, and one of her racing helmets from the 1970s and '80s now sits in the Smithsonian Institution's collection.
Oyama first claimed the Guinness title in September 2024, at 64 years and 326 days old, after competing at the World Skate Games in Chieti, Italy. According to UPI, she has no intention of letting the record sit: she's already entered to defend it again this October at the next World Skate Games.
Off the course, Oyama mentors younger skaters and serves as vice president of Board Rescue, a nonprofit that gets secondhand skateboards to kids who can't afford their own. Her longevity in a sport built around youth and risk has made her something of a folk hero within slalom circles, a niche corner of skateboarding that rarely draws mainstream attention outside moments like this one.
For a sport whose biggest recent stars have included Olympic gold medalists still in their early teens, Oyama's continued presence on the starting line is its own kind of record-breaking — a reminder that in slalom, at least, steady nerves can outlast fresh knees.
