Skip to content

Longboarder seeks full-time sponsors

Extreme Sports
Charlie Daigneault
Charlie Daigneault in competition.

 It’s hard being an amateur athlete. You have to balance work, home life and your chosen sport while paying your own expenses to compete in that sport that you love.

Gibsons Charlie Daigneault, who now lives in Roberts Creek, is an example of an amateur athlete doing everything she can to make her dreams come true.

The 23-year-old skateboard enthusiast fell in love with longboarding when she heard about the Attack of Danger Bay competition in Pender Harbour.

“I was skateboarding for 10 years, and I heard about the longboarding event in Pender and I went up there and was blown away,” she said. “I thought ‘these guys are crazy’ and I want to learn how to do this.”

Somehow she was able to get the gear together and raced in 2008 at Danger Bay 7. She has been competing ever since.

She doesn’t have a full-time longboard sponsor, which makes it challenging coming up with the entry fees to attend races. She does get some gear from Bustin Boards, based in Brooklyn, New York, but everything else is all out of her pocket.

A few months ago, she went on Facebook and asked for some community support. She got that support from Sol Spa in Davis Bay when Linda Balash and Bruce Cawston offered to help pay her entry fee for May’s Attack of Danger Bay and the Maryhill Festival of Speed event that she attended in June.

“It was just awesome. I had never met them before. They just wanted to help out a young athlete from their community,” she said. “It’s super cool how awesome this community is.”

Daigneault made it to the quarterfinals at the Maryhill Festival of Speed, but has finished higher in the past. She said the level of competition is increasing every day, especially among female riders, something she is certainly proud to be a part of.

“The last two years there has been a huge increase of women in the sport and the quality of riding has been super competitive,” she said. “I think it’s just gained a lot more popularity. It’s not as big as, say, street skating, and it’s still a male dominated sport for sure, but I think women are seeing that they too can compete at just as high a level.”

Daigneault has one competition left this season, this weekend in Kimberly. She’s hoping for a big finish and then setting her sights on next season.

“It’s hard to get sponsorship, but I’ll never stop regardless,” she said. “I just love going out, having fun and competing against the top riders. It’s definitely addictive.”