When we went to interview Javiera, we saw that she had gotten there early in order to start training. Roller skates on and ready for action, she practiced some of her best tricks. This young woman combines her passion for sports with the consumption of certain cannabinoids such as CBD, which can help with physical and mental recovery after hard training sessions.
You’ve been skating since you were a child, but you didn’t start Freestyle until you were 18. What caught your attention about this skating style?
I discovered this sport for the first time on the street; I saw a group of kids grinding on a curb which caught my attention – how could they possibly be doing that? It was something I had never seen before and the movements in each trick seemed so stylish.
This particular sport involves falling quite a lot. Do you have any tricks to get over that fear?
Whenever you go to a skatepark or spot you should always warm up with a safe trick and go step by step to increase your confidence. In my case, the tricks I usually use to try out a spot are backside, royal and soul.
When you started out where there many other female skaters practicing this style of skating? Did you come up against any type of prejudice?
When I started out there weren’t any other girls skating in Chile, which motivated me even more, I was challenging myself to prove that women can do it to.
I’ve never felt any type of prejudice from other skaters – in fact, quite the opposite, I’ve felt very supported. However, there is a topic that has generated plenty of controversy online lately and that is the difference between the prizes for men and women’s categories in competitions. While it’s true that men do more complex tricks and movements, the motivation that pushes them to go over their limits and spend all of their time training and improving is proportionate to the cash prize they get, and many of them can live off of this successfully. However, this doesn’t happen in the women’s category – the prizes are always much lower, and I think that if this changed new generations could bring more of a female presence to the world of skating. The same thing happens in other extreme sports.
What was it like for you to participate in the 2019 World Roller Games?
Representing my country was the best. That year, there still wasn’t any sort of freestyle skating federation in Chile, so there weren’t any Chilean representatives in my particular category. I got in touch with the organization and they suggested that I talk to a Chilean sporting federation in order to sign up – that’s how I managed to represent my country. I prepared for months, the ramps were massive, and I managed to come 7th worldwide. It was an amazing experience.
Who do you admire?
I admire other female skaters like Chihiro Azuma, Chynna Weierstall, Mery Muñoz and Martina Sovodoba.
Where do you see your career in 10 years?
In 10 years I see myself skating still, motivating new generations and developing my businesses such as Xfem, a CBD-product subscription box designed to help women in all sports.
What’s the best thing you’ve learned from roller skating?
The best thing about roller skating is that it opened the door to the world for me – wherever I go, I run into a roller skater that shares my passion; it’s like having a big family. It’s also taught me to be persevering, constant and to want to keep getting better every day. Roller Skating has shown me how to use frustration as a way to be better than yesterday. At the end of the day, that’s what life is, a battle with one’s self.
What do you think about the roller skating community in Barcelona?
There are loads of skating spots in Barcelona and quite a high level – this is a city where all professional riders come to film. The scene is also a bit segmented into groups – maybe there should be some sort of activity to unite everyone.
Cannabis and sports are generally two concepts that don’t mix well together, at least not for many. Do you think cannabis an contribute to athletic performance?
I was born and raised in Chile, where they taught us that marijuana is a drug that takes you down the wrong path, but this prejudice is slowly changing. It’s true that cannabis is highly stigmatized within sports; for most sporting competitions you have to take an anti-doping test and THC is prohibited due to its psychoactive effect.
Over the years, scientific investigations have discovered other properties of cannabis that we didn’t know about before. Cannabis has over 100 different cannabinoids, although the main ones are THC and CBD, which produce different effects. On one hand, we have THC which is psychoactive, and on the other hand we have CBD which doesn’t get you “high” (non-psychoactive).
I’ll give you a clearer example; high-performance athletes or extreme sport athletes are constantly submitting their bodies to hard, high impact exercise, and painful training is often unavoidable; you get inflamed, bruised, muscle pains etc. Many times, this pain can affect performance in a competition and mental state also greatly affects an athlete’s performance.
Rather than taking ibuprofen for pain, consuming CBD can help reduce inflammation, while also reducing anxiety levels and allowing you to relax. Recovery is much faster with CBD.
