Byline: Tom Gatti

Gator was the boy wonder of the skateboard until his tragic fall to earth, writes Tom Gatti

If there's an Icarus of skateboarding, he's Mark "Gator" Rogowski. Gator could fly. He could skim the lip of a vertical ramp, hurling his arms and board several feet up into the air with controlled abandon, holding himself like a defiant Wile E. Coyote. And then, gravity reminded of its job, he is brought down, the four wheels of his board slipping on to the ramp as tightly as if he was riding an invisibly grooved rollercoaster. Like Icarus, Gator loved heights and ignored their dangers. When he finally fell, he fell long and hard and alone and he did not get up.

Stoked, Helen Stickler's compelling first feature-length documentary, tells Gator's story through interviews with his peers and carefully collected photographs and footage.

Growing up in California in the 1970s, Gator (his nickname is left curiously unexplained) turned away from prescriptive after-school activities like little league baseball and found his metier in skateboarding -then still a "skeletal sport". He was determined and effortless on wheels and, crucially, he had style.

His multicolour, punk-rock dress sense and rebel-rousing charisma meant that when Gator was skating, you stood still and watched.

In the mid-1980s an industry grew up around the sport....