Medalist, Arisa Trew of Team Australia during the Women’s Park Final on day eleven of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on August 6, 2024 in Paris, France.
What did 14-year-old skateboarder Arisa Trew request from her parents after she received an Olympic gold medal in skateboarding?
Here's a hint: it's what you say if a skateboard happens to go flying near your head.
That's right. She wants a duck.
“My parents promised if I won the gold medal I would get a pet duck,” she said at a press conference.
Why might Trew want a duck, of all pets?
“Because they are really cute, then I can take it on walks and take it to the skate park," she said.
She does have a point there.
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Trew attends LVLUP, an academy and school on the Gold Coast of Australia where she can both study and hone her skateboarding skills. Her school friends slept over at the skate park so they could wake up and watch her compete in Paris.
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"It feels amazing having the gold medal around my neck," she said. "It's been my goal since watching the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. That inspired me and made me want to come to this Olympics and get to the podium, which is, like, amazing."
Trew originally dove into the surfing world, then turned to skateboarding at age 8 when it was too cold to surf. She is the only woman to land a 720 (two complete rotations) in competition — and the only woman to ever land a 900.
"It's like, almost just normal to be honest," said her father Simon Trew said to a reporter from Nine, an Australian network. "We watch her skate every day, and we watch her just do these tricks and watch her practice these tricks all day. We watch her fall and get up and just jump back out and do it again." His wife Aiko Trew was right by his side, holding up a poster with their daughter's name on it.
“My parents definitely wouldn’t let me get a dog or a cat because we are traveling so much right now," 14-year-old Arisa said to Nine. “But I feel like a duck might be a little bit easier, and ... I don’t know, I just want a duck."
Trew said she's not quite sure what she'll name her duck, but she does have one frontrunner: Goldie.
This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY:
