Rollerblading
Knee pads, wrist guards, a helmet your mom insisted on, and a driveway full of wobble: for one long decade, America put its shoes on wheels. Rollerblading was the '90s outdoor craze — a brand name that swallowed an entire sport.
Inline skates are old technology, but the '90s craze traces to Minneapolis, where Scott Olson started modifying and selling early inline skates around 1980; by the late '80s his company had become Rollerblade, Inc. The name stuck to the activity itself — nobody 'inline skated,' everybody 'rollerbladed' — a genericization so complete the company spent years fighting to keep its trademark from going the way of aspirin.
And then the '90s happened. Inline skating became one of the decade's signature outdoor activities, drawing tens of millions of participants — kids orbiting cul-de-sacs, commuters weaving boardwalks, whole families in matching wrist guards. Newsweek pegged the American inline market at $650 million by 1994, with Rollerblade holding roughly 40 percent of it; by one late-'90s industry telling, close to two-thirds of American 11-year-olds owned a pair. The gear was half the ritual — pads strapped on assembly-line style, the stiff plastic boot clomp on the garage floor, learning to brake via the nearest lawn.
The sport grew an extreme wing, too: aggressive inline — grinding rails and launching out of halfpipes — rode the same wave as skateboarding, with events at the X Games from 1995 to 2005. But the mainstream craze peaked in the late '90s and sagged in the 2000s, squeezed by parental injury worries and the rising pull of skateboarding and organized sports. The skates migrated to garage shelves next to the Slip 'N Slide, where most of them still sit — waiting out a comeback that periodically threatens to arrive every time gas prices spike or a pandemic empties the sidewalks.
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