Morrah Jakubiec would be delighted if life were all downhill from here.
The 33-year Barrie mom has been a longtime longboarder, competing in competitions and promoting the sport. But less than two years ago she discovered street luging, very similar to the winter Olympic winter luging sport, only in the summer and on asphalt.
There’s nothing quite like donning a leather suit, lying back on something akin to a longboard with handles, rubber-encased feet first, and hitting a paved street on a steep vertical lined with hay bails hoping to hit something close to 100 kilometres per hour, and nothing else.
“When I found longboarding … I felt free,” explains Jakubiec, who discovered the stand-up version of the sport during what she describes as a bad period in her life when she was 19. “I found that there was this euphoria about it. There’s a high outside of drug use and it feels so good.
“When I started doing it I had all the passion for it and none of the skills… I had a lot of road rash in my early years, but I was always drawn to it.”
Jakubiec is a cabinetmaker by trade who owns Framework Studios – a shared woodworking shop for professionals – and works with her partner, also a longboarder, in a cabinetry business in the studio space.
Once she took up longboarding, she’d go out before work and be back on it again after work. Then she stumbled across Ontario’s skate community, became active in Toronto Girls Longboarding where she learned more and developed her skills. And she competed, often finding herself navigating hilly terrain in a crouched position in search of speed in the United States.
She’s still involved in that scene, works on the group’s social media pages called Skate Invaders and happily promotes the sport. They’ll often run events for beginners for which Jakubiec likes to recruit. She also likes to see women get involved.
During one of the U.S. events, she met another skater from Ontario who introduced her to street luge, which he’d been doing for a decade and a half.
When she later suffered a knee injury leaving her unable to drive for a month and had to rely on her partner to drive their seven-year-old daughter in the mornings, she thought it might be time to push away from the stand-up part of the sport. Street luge, still an extreme sport, seemed less risky and it has longevity with riders still participating well into their 60s.
So, with her third-hand leather suit complete with built-in knee pads and elbow pads, a borrowed street luge board, a full-face helmet, gloves and special shoes fitted with tire rubber to be used as brakes, she gave it a try during a free-ride event in Virginia, a rare luging opportunity outside of racing.
She adapted her longboard racing skills to the prone sport, navigating hairpin turns down a mountain road for a spectacular five-minute ride.
“The knowledge on the hill is transferrable” from the stand-up longboarding races, she says. “It feels natural to be out there on it … because I had been at those speeds before.”
The events, which are usually races, she explains, are on a closed street lined with hay bales. Paramedics are on site, officials are at the top and bottom of the course and marshals with flags are posted along the course. A marshal waving a yellow flag signifies caution to riders and a red flag requires the rider to stop.
She then travelled to Ohio for her first race. It didn’t go so smoothly. A rider ahead of her hit a hay bale and her board went flying. It struck Jakubiec in the face and knocked her backwards off her board. With a bloody tongue, Jakubiec chased after her board, hopped back on and completed the race, finishing last.
Although she came in fourth, the top two women from each country were given the chance to compete in the world championship. As one of two Canadian women competing, she was still able to qualify for Team Canada and race in the Downhill Longboard and Street Luge World Championship put on by World Skating in the Philippines in February, where she took home the gold.
At that race, her second, she “used great strategy and navigated through her competition to claim the second ever women's Street Luge World Championship” reads the Canada Skateboard Instagram announcement.
Her fourth race ever comes this September when she travels to Tortoreto, Italy to compete in the biggest field street luging has ever seen – 12 women. The five-day event consists of training time on the hill, timed qualifiers and a race day.
Including some “free rides” in New York, Quebec and Virginia, she’s been on a street luge a total of eight times. If there’s an event and she can get there, declares Jakubiec, she’s going to go to take advantage of hills that are steeper than what she can access in Ontario.
Training is largely limited to gym work, focusing on the core and the legs.
Sponsorship for travelling and participating in the events are rare for the largely unknown sport. So Jakubiec has set up a fundraising page, much like she did when she went to the Philippines, in hopes of raising $3,900 to cover some of her costs.
When asked if her daughter might follow in her footsteps, Jakubiec says she doesn’t want to push the sport on her.
“But if she asks I’ll drop whatever I’m doing… I’ll even push her up a hill,” she says, adding that she hopes one day to have her daughter and partner in the crowds watching her race.
Jakubiec, who has no intention of ever quitting the sport, hopes that street luging will one day follow skateboarding into the Olympics as an official event.
