The Coronavirus pandemic has had obvious effects on professional skateboarding. It’s not exactly a job that you can do from home. Travel bans, shelter-in-place orders, and social distancing have halted production of video projects, and make it difficult to even get proper social media content. Nestor Judkins weighs in on how this has impacted him personally in a new interview with Seller Door. This sheds some light on why Nestor, and a few others, are now absent from RVCA’s team page. 

The virus completely shut off travel for the foreseeable future and left all of us, professional skateboarders, at home. My whole career up to this point has been based on travel. My job was to film video parts, shoot photos for magazines, and travel. So, what am I supposed to do? I’m struggling with that. I’m not going to go out and post skating stuff right now – although that’s the new important aspect of the job. I don’t feel comfortable doing that because I don’t want to promote breaking the stay-at-home order; I take that seriously. Yet that’s a huge part of what our job has been turning into until this point. So what should I be doing?

As for skateboard companies, I do think that this economic crisis will change things. I suspect that many companies won’t make it, and I worry that professional skateboarding is going to be pretty expendable, unfortunately. And to me it’s unclear what will determine who makes it: will it be based on talent and craft or sheer numbers? That’s an important determination with huge impact for the future of skateboarding. That’s my concern.

Maybe these are just my fears because I’ve already lost a very significant sponsor due to this virus. I don’t want to call anyone out because there are no hard feelings. We had a long relationship, and they’re going through a hard time, as are many companies, so they had to cut a certain percentage of their teams to stay afloat. Either way, the point is that the effects are real, and I see them continuing.

Read the full interview here.

Image Via Jonathan Mehring / Jenkem