Alan Gelfand

Alan Gelfand, known as Ollie, is an American skateboarder, racing driver and entrepreneur, born on 1 January 1963, who is credited with inventing the ollie, the foundational skateboarding trick. He was born in New York City, moved with his family to Hollywood, Florida, in 1972 and started skateboarding in 1974 after his father bought him his first skateboard. He first performed the trick in 1976 at the Skateboard USA park in Hollywood, where badly built, over-vertical features made the board pitch back toward his legs, and by 1979 he was perfecting it at Winchester Skate Park in San Jose. The January 1979 issue of SkateBoarder Magazine carried a how-to feature on his no-hand ollie air. He was the first member of Stacy Peralta's Bones Brigade team, and the Oxford Dictionary of English, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Webster's Dictionary credit him as the trick's inventor.