I love a good, weird and crappy skateboard, especially when it’s from a foreign country. To look at these you would think they came from the Eastern Bloc. But no, they came from an Italy and a man named Icaro Olivieri. He was apparently quite an innovator in hockey, and a manufacturer of all kinds of sporting goods under the brand name of GIOCA, which translates to “Play.” I stumbled across one of these while looking for Tres Assi boards. It looks like Gioca might have made real skateboards at some point, but I couldn’t find any picutres outside of the advert in the bottom right corner.
Here’s the one that started it all. It’s a “Ringo Roll” which I thought might be the name of the board but it turns out that it was just a brand of cookies made by the Pavesi company. This was a promotional board of some sort.
While trying to find additional Ringo Roll boards, the same board started showing up under the Gioca brand, this one being the SK51 model. These boards belong in the category of “skateboard shell” boards. For the sake of cheapness, the underneath is scaffolding that makes it look real from the top and the sides. Fool your friends! Once. Still fun to ride if the wheels spun. A good gateway toy for kids. Still, classic plastic banana boards were already cheap, so how much money could you have saved?
I found a lot of them that looked the same but on closer inspection, some had different model names. This next one particularly well-used one is the SK21. Not only has this skateboard seen some wear and tear, the whole photo collection has the air of something that was pulled out of waxy bundle of greasy photos tied together with a piece of frayed twine.
Side note: I feel compelled to separate out two of the photos that I feel deserve recognition amongst the funniest pictures in skateboarding auction history. Enough so that it forces me quote the lyrics of the lesser version of Faith No More*, in this, their song Epic: “It’s it. What is it?”
Above left, it’s almost unrecognizable as a skateboard, and reminiscent of a pinewood derby car my father woke me out of bed to hastily make one night with the race being the next morning. Our slab was red. Above right brings to mind the physical manifestation of Charlie Brown, if he was a skateboard.
And now, the rest of the pictures, including some neglected views of the wheels, missing from most of the other auctions.
If you look at a lot of the auctions on this board, they all claim to be from 1983, which certainly is in the ballpark, but might be a little misleading.
Montebelluna is a city in Veneto, Italy where Olivieri was headquartered. The rest translates to: “Product compliant with Article 1 of Law 48 of February 16, 1983.” I’m not sure exactly what that refers to, I tried finding that law to translate it but I couldn’t In any case it seems to me this in unlikely a production date, and instead a compliance notice to a safety regulation passed in 83, so it’s post 1983 to be sure.
Now enjoy this, possibly the worst copped assemblage of thumbnails ever to exist. There’s no way to make these bad photos present themselves in an honorable fashion automatically. Update. There was a way. I broke them into two different galleries.
Contrast those with this much nicer photo collage found online at a web site called 20 Cola dot com amongst an online museum of collectables and sporting equipment. I’d link directly, but in the couple of weeks that I’ve been sitting on this post the site has since been inflected with malware!
Check out the advert! It was just an ancillary photo in one of the plastic board auctions, maybe to give the brand name some heft. It implies the existence of “real” skateboards from GIOCA, but I couldn’t find any other evidence.
Acrobazie o no lo l’importante che sia uno skateboard gioca fabbricato in italia sull’esperianza americana. Da sempra i migliori
Acrobatics or not, the important thing is that it’s a skateboard, made in Italy, drawing on American expertise. Always the best.
And that’s it. Let us know if you find one in a other color way, or can confirm the existence of a non-plastic Gioca skate.
* You ask, “What is the greater version of Faith No More?” A: The version with Chuck Mosley. Ask his ghost about the best way to get to the beach.
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