Alexis Sablone is bringing her knowledge of architecture to the Olympics, though not in the way you might expect from a professional artist with degrees in the subject from MIT and Columbia.

The 34-year-old Connecticut native represents the US during this year’s delayed Tokyo Olympic Games, joining the inaugural skateboarding team on their quest for gold.

Sablone, who has been skating since she was 10, is able to compete this year because of a rule that allows Olympic hosts to add different “demonstration” sports to the games every year. The three-time X Games gold medalist has dominated the professional skateboarding circuit since her debut in 2002, earning sponsorships from Converse and wheelmaker Dial Tone along the way. 

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The goofy-footed skater finished her Master’s at MIT in 2016 after using earnings that she made on the pro skate tour to continue her study of the discipline begun while Sablone was an undergraduate at Barnard College. Her graduate work tended to focus mainly on smaller-scale projects as well as “exploring computation and fabrication methods within architecture” and has given her a background that recently informed her design for a skateable public sculpture in Malmo called “Lady in the Square.” The design of an international waste repository served as her thesis titled “Nuclear Oasis: The Story of 10,000-year-old Trash.”

Sablone is also an outspoken activist for challenging gender norms and addressing pay equity. She will install additional sculptures in Stockholm and West Palm Beach, FL soon that she described in a 2019 Thrasher Magazine interview as “shared spaces for the community and for skaters.”

“I’ve never wanted a conventional job, and skateboarding has given me the freedom to work on all sorts of creative projects all over the world,” she told the New York Times. 

Sablone performed very well on Monday, though she felt short of medaling in a tough women's street skateboarding final.