For subscribers: Olympic skateboarder Bryce Wettstein of Encinitas is one of a kind (2024)

TOKYO—

Encinitas resident Bryce Wettstein is a 17-year-old professional skateboarder who will compete in the park competition as the sport makes its Olympics debut. She plays the ukulele and has released two songs she wrote and sings. She mentors young girls in the neighborhood. She’s on her high school volleyball team. She surfs. She paints. She reads. She makes jewelry. She keeps dream journals.

But maybe more than anything else, she thinks.

Big thoughts. Deep thoughts. Profound thoughts.

Her favorite necklace has colorful, lettered beads that spell out, simply: “Be you.”

And she is, floating through life like she does inside a skate bowl, innocent, effervescent, languid, creative, genuine, unique. Herself.

“I love Bryce,” says Poland’s Amelia Brodka, the de facto matriarch of the women’s skate community in San Diego that accounts for much of the Tokyo field. “She’s wise beyond her years. She’s incredibly talented in a lot of different realms, just a very kind human being, very thoughtful. She’s like no one I’ve ever met.”

Wettstein likes to invent her own words to better convey her thoughts. “Originalation,” she calls it.

“Majestical” is another.

“Imagicination” is her favorite.

“Imagicination is like another universe you can go to,” she explains. “And when you have that, you don’t have to worry about conforming to how something should look. You almost want to articulate it and mold it and sculpt it into how your imagination would want it. It’s kind of this magic that emanates from you.”

Donna Wettstein didn’t know any better. Bryce was her first child. She figured all kids were like this.

“I would go upstairs to see if she was awake,” Donna says, “and she would be in her crib, talking to herself and this imagination world around her. I almost felt like there were angels in the bedroom, or magical fairies. She’s having full conversations with herself and this imaginary world.

“We came to recognize that she’s special in a certain way that I can’t even explain or understand. We just kind of let it go and flourish.”

One thing you wouldn’t ever imagine: She’d be able to excel at 5-foot-10 in a sport that increasingly is becoming gymnastics on wheels, where physics favor the small and slight. Sky Brown, the 13-year-old favorite who competes for Great Britain and lives part-time in Oceanside, is 4-6 and 82 pounds.

But Wettstein has always defied, even rejected, convention. She began skating when she heard her father, a pilot for JetBlue, took his board into swimming pools and thought that sounded cool, only to realize later there wasn’t actually any water in them. By 7, she had entered her first event. Later that year, she had her first board sponsor.

She’s had top-10 finishes at the last two World Championships and was third at the X Games two weeks ago at the CA Training Facility in Vista. She now has a dozen sponsors, including Converse, Core Hydration and McGill’s Skate Shop in Encinitas, but no coach. She handles that herself.

She practices at the various skateparks around the county, and also in her backyard. In 2009, the Wettsteins built the Iguana Bowl, named after their pet Spike, that has morphed and stretched over the years to its current form. In 2019, they received the blessing of their neighbors to add a 10-foot vert ramp on the condition they remove it once Wettstein finished training for the Olympics. (They’re donating it to the Encinitas YMCA.)

“When she gets back from Tokyo,” Donna says, “her baby isn’t going to be in the backyard anymore, which is kind of bittersweet.”

Bryce Wettstein skating in the “Iguana Bowl” in the backyard of her Encinitas home.

(K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)

It was necessary, they reasoned, because they wanted their daughter to attend traditional high school — she’ll be a senior at San Dieguito Academy — instead of online or home school like other skateboard prodigies. That left less time, and daylight, to find sufficiently uncrowded practice facilities after class.

“We want her to experience a normal life,” says Donna, a local realtor. “We didn’t want her to think she’s a rock star. We wanted her to be a part of the community and play team sports and be with regular teachers and go to class and know how hard life really is. We didn’t want to give her an escape just because she’s really good at athletics. We didn’t want to shelter her.

“It also means she had to work harder to be good. All the home-schooled children got to practice twice as long.”

The result is a refreshing innocence, a 1960s flower child teleported to the 2020s, blue eyes that see the world through a different lens.

On being perpetually inquisitive: “Usually trying to find answers is so much less beautiful than asking a question, because a question is like knocking on the door of something rather than answers always closing it. Which is OK. Answers are still beautiful, too.”

On spontaneity: “Being spontaneous is the true sequential order of how your life should run. It’s basically just you un-constraining from all the things that toggle you into a certain order. It’s having the order of you come out, rather than having to abide by someone else’s laws. You’re just having everything in you blossom at a specific moment. I’ve always wanted to be able to listen to my heart and not have to think on a schedule.”

On school: “It’s collecting little pendants of knowledge.”

Bryce Wettstein (left) and Brighton Zeuner, pictured nearly seven years ago in Encinitas, will compete in the Tokyo Olympics.

(K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)

At a competition when she was 9, she met Brighton Zeuner, another budding skate star who lived in Arizona. Soon the Zeuners had moved to Encinitas, home of Tony Hawk and the epicenter of the skating world. Soon, Brighton and Bryce were best friends.

Now they’re at the Olympics together. The third member of the U.S. women’s park team, 22-year-old Jordyn Barratt, lives in Oceanside. Of the men’s park team, Cory Juneau and Heimana Reynolds also live in the county and Zion Wright regularly trains there.

It makes for a cooperative, collaborative community that roots for each other. Wettstein is routinely the first person to hug her competitors after they complete a run.

“Everybody’s skateboarding is a masterpiece, so how do you judge it?” she wonders, pausing to admire a butterfly floating past the Iguana Bowl. “Well, you can’t really judge it. It’s like walking into an art gallery and looking at a picture and it stands out. It’s like, why does it? To another person, another picture might stand out.

“When everyone can just see that, we can ditch being such rivals with each other because we’re not. We can ditch being head-to-head. It’s more like heart to heart. It’s almost like the competition is always between yourself and who you are.”

Be you.

Bryce Wettstein, 17, is the top U.S. park skateboarder.

(K.C. Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune)