Rock to Fakie, Right to Belong: Germany’s Wheelchair Skaters Claim Their Space

He takes up speed over a long, flat concrete path toward a quarter pipe. At the coping, he hooks his front wheels into a “Rock to Fakie,” shifts his weight, loosens the casters, and drops back down into the ramp. He flips around, pushes again to regain speed, balances on a wheel over a manual pad, and barely loses speed.

Then comes the final obstacle: another quarter ramp. He rolls in, leans backward, lowering his hand behind his back and onto the wall, while his wheels lose touch and lift up in the air. He’s upside down. The crowd reacts with a mix of astonishment and cheering.

This is David Lebuser.

Forever Third Place

Lebuser is a 39-year-old skater from Hamburg, Germany, with shoulder-length hair, usually parted in the middle, each side a different color. He often wears a cap, if not a large helmet, and usually carries a political message somewhere on his clothes. Today, it is on his socks: “Fck Nazis.”

In recent years, Lebuser has repeatedly placed third at the World Championships in the United States — in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. “I am forever in third place,” he chuckles. He did win “Best Overall Run” in the wheelchair section in 2014, though.

Many would describe him as a badass: someone drawn to challenge, calculated risk, and speed. Lebuser is also a wheelchair user and the first professional German wheelchair skater.

For some non-disabled people, the words wheelchair and skating still sound like a contradiction. But for Lebuser, the real challenge is not skating with a wheelchair. Wheelchair skaters can do many of the same tricks as other skaters, he says, except for kickflips, which are difficult in a wheelchair. The real barrier is access to skateparks — public places intended for everyone, but often not designed or managed with wheelchair users in mind.

Beating Stereotypes

At first glance, the connection is obvious: a skateboard has four wheels, and so does a wheelchair. So why would wheelchair users not skate?

The answer has less to do with sport than with the assumptions attached to disability. Disabled people are still often seen through a medicalized lens: as people who need care, protection, or supervision, rather than people who make their own decisions, take risks, or are allowed to make mistakes.

Before Lebuser became a wheelchair user, he says he was not a particularly good skater. After an accident in 2008, his friends — mostly skaters — showed him a video of Aaron Fotheringham, the well-known wheelchair skater, doing a backflip. “I thought this was impossible, but the idea would not let go of me.”

Once Lebuser moved out of his hospital chair — “a shitty wheelchair I was barely able to move with, but better than being stuck in a hospital bed” — and into an active wheelchair, a wheelchair designed to be moved independently, it did not take long before he started trying his first tricks.

“Once I learned how to get back into my wheelchair from the floor, which is incredibly exhausting, I thought, now is the time to learn how to skate since I am comfortable falling out of my chair.” While still in the rehabilitation facility, he visited a nearby skatepark.

He took up speed, rolled over a four-way skate ramp, and landed on his face while several other skaters stared at him in concern. Lebuser, meanwhile, was laughing. For the first time after his accident, he says, he felt independent again.

What was still missing was community. In 2012, Lebuser went to his first competition in Los Angeles. “I felt a sense of belonging being surrounded by dozens of wheelchair skaters since I was always the only one in Germany. And I have learned more in two days in LA than in two years in Germany. So when I came back from LA, I decided I wanted to have that kind of community right here, in Hamburg.”

That was the beginning of Sit’n’Skate.

From Health Hazards to Insurance Risks

Building that community in Germany was not simple. In the 1990s and early 2000s, skating was everywhere. Teenagers had Tony Hawk posters in their rooms. Skateparks were places where young people tried tricks, failed, broke bones, and tried again. Risk was part of the culture. Getting hurt after attempting a difficult trick was often treated as a badge of honor.

But when disabled people take the same risks, the attitude often changes. What is considered courage for non-disabled skaters quickly becomes a “health risk” or an “insurance problem” when wheelchair users are involved.

“When I wanted to bring more disabled people to the skatepark, the owners told me that it’s OK if I regularly come there, but their insurance would not cover more disabled people. They said it’s too dangerous, too risky.”

That framing is familiar to many disabled people: exclusion presented as protection. Disabled people are often told that access cannot be granted because it would be too complicated, too dangerous, or too much of a liability. The result is the same: other people make decisions about where disabled people can go, what they can try, and how much risk they are allowed to take.

For Lebuser, that logic was unacceptable. “That’s what we kept hearing from everyone, and I thought, fuck this! Does nobody really want to support us?!”

Sit’n’Skate’s First Workshop

A turning point came when Lebuser appeared on the cover of the German Wheelchair Sport Magazine, which wrote about his passion for wheelchair skating. The story generated interest within the community, and on May 5, 2013, he hosted his first wheelchair-skating workshop in Germany with the help of a small Hamburg-based organization, UTE, and the German Wheelchair Sport Association (DRS). 

Forty people took part. “I had no idea what I was doing, but everyone had a good time. There weren’t as many people as I met in LA, but close enough. And one thing became obvious: They really wanted more.”

Since then, attitudes at his local skatepark in Hamburg have shifted. What once felt like “what’s the guy in the wheelchair doing here?” has become “ohhh, cool, another wheelchair skater!”

“Here in Hamburg, where people know Sit’n’Skate and have seen me around, nobody is staring at me or asking me whether I can walk or not. But if you are going to a more rural area where people don’t have much contact with any wheelchair user, much less skaters, people still have the same stereotypes in their heads and are confused when they see me skating. We still have a long way to go for people with disabilities to be fully included.”

Inclusion, Lebuser’s work shows, does not happen automatically. It requires time, hard work, and persistence. For years, he hosted workshops for free while also working a full-time job. Eventually, the workload became unsustainable. He did not know how Sit’n’Skate could continue until Jens Dreesen, founder of the non-profit SUPR SPORTS, discovered his work and connected him with a network of funders in 2020.

“Until this moment, I have always thought of Sit’n’Skate as sports only. But then I understood we could be an organization that uses sports for social change.” Sit’n’Skate operated under SUPR SPORTS for a while, learning organizational structures, before becoming its own non-profit in 2024.

Today, Sit’n’Skate has five paid team members and many volunteers. The organization offers workshops in several German cities, including Hamburg, Hannover, Dortmund, Bremen, Oldenburg, and Aurich. It also runs inclusive school holiday programs for children, organizes skate events, and supports newly disabled wheelchair users in learning how to move safely and confidently through public space.

But Sit’n’Skate is not only a sports organization. Its community has also become an activism platform, organizing protests and challenging discrimination in Germany.

From Trainee to Trainer

“We are here to support disabled people in their decision-making. We are not questioning their ability. We want them to try new tricks, and we are by their side to make sure it’s as safe as possible for them. We don’t want to hold a traditional workshop where people have to follow a certain curriculum as they do at school. It’s an open and safe space where everyone can learn and try things out at their own speed.”

Sit’n’Skate is open to people with different disabilities. Because every participant has different strengths, balance, mobility, and experience, tricks have to be approached individually. The goal is not standardization. It is confidence, experimentation, and control.

“Some people have now been around for years and developed from being trained to trainers who are now teaching others, like they were taught years ago. It’s nice to see disabled people feel so empowered by their own transformation.”

Long-term, Lebuser says, Sit’n’Skate is working toward a society that does not discriminate — one in which disabled people can participate in all areas of life.

“We know we are a small piece in the puzzle, but we are reaching our main outcome: empowering wheelchair users to be more independent and confident, becoming more visible in society and, in the end, being proud to be disabled.”

That work is no longer limited to the people who show up at Sit’n’Skate workshops. Over the years, the organization has also helped shift how skateparks are imagined and planned in Germany. Today, some skatepark designers are beginning to consider wheelchair users in their designs — something that would have seemed almost impossible ten years ago.

It is a small but significant change: from wheelchair users being treated as an insurance risk at skateparks to being considered in the design of the parks themselves.

At the skatepark, that outcome can start with something simple: taking up speed, trying a trick, falling, laughing, getting back into the chair, and going again.

Feature Photo Credit: Therese Walther, www.sucherin.de