In 1981, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould returned to the piece that made him world famous as the precocious age of 22: Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Gould was still only 49, but if we was as superstitious as some stories suggest, he may have believed this year to be his last – since the digits in his age added up to thirteen. As it turned out, Gould both survived the year and created his second recording of Bach’s thirty-two variations.

The album was released in September 1982. A month later, a week after his fiftieth birthday, Gould died from a stroke.  

Had Gould lived to something like a riper old age, I doubt we’d talk about these second Variations in quite the same way. The fact that he turned to this career-defining piece at what turned out to be the very end of his career – and that he bookended a remarkable creative life with two versions of the same performance – practically insists we turn it into a story: an example of the mind’s tendency to create order and patterns from randomness. By default, this second version becomes a ‘late’ Gould.

What makes this stylistically a ‘late’ work is shaped by many things, but most notably, the fact that it is conspicuously slower than the recording made in 1954. The early version, 38 minutes in length, is played at a furiously concentrated pace, a dazzling cascade of entwined melodies. By contrast, the 1981 version, thirteen minutes longer, allows for air and space between the notes. While the fingers of the 22 year-old Gould seem to have an automated life of their own, at 49, the playing sounds more considered, more hesitant, deliberate.

I was 22 myself when I first heard the 1954 recording, which, predictably, I found more thrilling than the later one. Yet now that I’ve surpassed the age Gould was when he recorded them, it’s this second version that captures my attention. The early recording is the sound of a young virtuoso with all the world’s pieces to play, and all the time in the world to play them. The ‘late’ version, by contrast, sounds like the work of someone knowing they might not play these notes again, which means you end up listening to them all over again, as if for the first (and last) time.

So, from the piano to skateboarding, and from one Wunderkind to another, as recounted in Rodney Mullen’s memoir The Mutt:

‘You can understand where I’m coming from. Where are you in your life right now and how do you deal with it all? How can you skate knowing what you’ve done, knowing how good you’ve been, how can you skate just for the sake of rolling down the street again?’

Mullen is talking here to his friend, Tony Hawk, in 1999. Mullen was just 33 at the time: a freestyle champion many times over before the end of his teens, and widely credited with having invented much of modern skateboarding. Hawk (31), for his part, had recently landed the first ‘900’ at the X-Games, and was as famous then as a skateboarder would probably ever be. And yet for Mullen, despite being still at the height of their game, both were already staring into the skateboarding abyss.

As the Nietzsche-quoting Mullen may not quite have said:

When you’ve climbed the mountain, where else is there to go but down?

It’s the same question I broached a few posts back when discussing the recent Roger Federer documentary, Twelve Final Days. Mullen’s and Federer’s stories might share some common points, yet in spite of what he may have said a quarter of a century ago, Mullen is still turning up, still kicking around – and rarely just ‘rolling down the street’. Approaching his sixties, he remains an explorer, a true experimenter in skateboarding style.

But as with Gould’s playing of the piano: what happens to this ‘style’ at such an age?

The concept of ‘late style’ rarely comes up in the discussion of athletes, for good reason. The brevity and comparatively early ‘end’ of sporting lives, usually winding down between 30 and 40, restricts that possibility. But so too does the fact that style, in most sporting contexts, is less important than success – or rather, appreciating athletic style is inconceivable outside the contexts of elite competition. Watching Federer’s grace around the court and his improbable shot-making was once famously described (by the writer David Foster Wallace) as a ‘religious experience’. Presumably it might always be so in some way. But take these same shots out of the floodlights, and the pursuit of victory, against equally determined and brilliant opponents – and what you basically have is mere practice.

Eventually, too, the calcification of the body, and its implications for speed and movement, mean that watching the older athlete in action becomes a bit like watching a covers band (or worse, perhaps, the actual band too many years down the road). Even those with the skill and imagination to adapt their game to the ravages of time (Michael Jordan, say, in his final couple of years at the Chicago Bulls) have to admit defeat in the end (and Jordan kept trying even after that). Whatever face they might see in the mirror, and however willing the athlete’s mind might be – and if they don’t feel young, why else do they keep on playing well beyond their best? – the body is all too weak.

The difference between tennis and skateboarding is that, while we can see both performed at a level of great intensity, only the former is necessarily competitive; a point which, by comparison, strengthens skateboarding’s claim to be an art form. Once you free it of competitive aims, just like any other activity, skateboarding gets its value from whatever the individual chooses to do with it. No longer bound up with the idea of being better than someone else, it enters the realm of pure expression. And even with the inevitable declining of athletic capacity, the possibilities here remain largely limitless.

Within the arts, as opposed to sports, late style is much more forgiving of (older) age. Art is also shaped itself by the awareness of the ageing mind and body, or even by its brute realities (the paper collages, for example, created by Henri Matisse when his hands could no longer hold a paintbrush). But for the artist, these possible restrictions might also be the source of reworkings and reinventions, or even ground-breaking innovations (Matisse’s cut-outs being a case in point). Gould, a hypochondriac and compulsive consumer of prescription meds, was also prey to musculoskeletal issues: a common theory suggests Gould suffered from focal dystonia, a neurological disease that affects the hands. Was Gould’s slower, more hesitant playing of 1981 in part an effect of, and even a reflection on, this physical fact? At some level, cruel as it might be, the world of music is possibly richer for it.

An idea of late style can be liberating for the ageing skateboarder (or perhaps even more so for the ageing beginner, in my case) at the point when limitation is allowed in, accepted as a necessary but also potentially positive condition of getting a bit older. Recent thinking in gerontology suggests we rethink the ‘declinist’ narrative of age more generally, and embrace it simply as another stage or phase: different, not deficient. Staying young is often held up as an ideal; but once we start trying to deny our age, or try to resist ageing, we end up internalising ageism: seeing getting older, by implication, as an undesirable process of demise.

Andy Macdonald, the 50 year-old skateboarder representing Team GB in this year’s Paris Olympics, recently said that you shouldn’t ‘age yourself out’ of what you want to do. Macdonald speaks to his belief that biological age need have no bearing on ability and accomplishment. He’s right, of course, as his Olympic selection proves. Yet at the same time – and perhaps more realistically, in most cases – it’s also okay to age yourself in: to accept that acting and creating within the constraints of an older body is not really a constraint at all, but its own kind of distinctive experience – and style. On which note:

The wears and tears of time might well be a component of this ‘late’ style, but the beauty lies in the fact that this style, like those layers of time and experience that shape our changing selves, then becomes the unique property of the older artist – or, in this instance, skateboarder. The Tired Video series, made during the mid-2010s, show an array of street tricks by middle-aged skaters of variable ability and physical fitness. Some tricks fail, most succeed; it doesn’t really matter, since the point is that they’re all (still) giving it a go. And while little here is quite as spectacular as one might see elsewhere – in videos of younger skaters, perhaps – the series’ beauty lies not in the moves, as such, but these moves situated in these specific bodies, at this specific time. Less tired, perhaps, than reflective, is how I would consider one of the key traits of this late skateboarding style. The right to play again, and the pleasure to be found in doing just that.

‘Have fun’, according to The Mutt, was Hawk’s answer to Mullen’s mid-life crisis. And while Hawk is perhaps the worst advert for his own advice – his recent film-profile, Until the Wheels Fall Off (2022), paints a picture of a man still haunted by his desire to push boundaries – there’s something pleasurable about seeing the Birdman really ageing himself ‘in’, and genuinely having fun.

There’s no shortage of Hawk videos out there on the internet, but my favourite is one of the most low-key: a short 2015 montage of Hawk and several other skaters riding the recently excavated ramps at Del Mar, the Californian skate ranch on which Hawk grew up. It’s possible that many of the mostly low-tariff, old-school tricks here – Bert slides, 360-degree spins, a boneless 180, a (failed) 360-degree shove-it – are dictated by the literally crumbling state of the track. But there’s also a sense here of skating stripped of the need to compete, or to exceed limits, and which becomes in turn both an expression of pure joy, and a kind of time-travel. A journey, most importantly, that can only make sense for a then 47 year-old skateboarder; as well as for our ageing selves, as watchers of that same journey, understanding what it means for him, but also for us.