Despite knowing better, I'm going to briefly chime in here.
There is a park that was built in the Hague for the Dutch Olympic team (I think the Italian team trains here as well). This is a new (non-public) park, which didn't exist prior to the Olympics and was created explicitly for the Olympics.
BUT, it is reasonable to ask, if the government didn't spend money on this non-public park, would they have allocated this money to creating public parks that don't have hydraulic controlled stair sets? Or, does this park signal a shift in the Dutch gov's prioritization of developing skateparks for the public?
In terms of answering this question in the USA, USA Skateboarding could easy fund a two part study to back up their claim that Olympics = more parks: 1) Someone needs to painstakingly chart when each park in the USA was built over the past 2 decades. This will give us a nice little line graph that shows us the number of parks and if there is any change in the number of parks built each year and if the trajectory of new parks is going up (staying flat or going down).
I have no idea if more parks are being built today than were being built 5 years ago, but I'd guess that there has been zero change in number of new parks per year aside from a small covid bump.
2) In terms of answering the motivation for new park creation team USA could easily fund this study: All they'd need to do is create a random sample of cities that have decided to create parks and ask the city council WHY they did this (OR request copies of the city's records related to skateparks (this can be done via a FOIL request)).
The most obvious guesses for new park creation are: A) skaters are old as dirt now and understand the political process better, which is leading to more pressure on city councils B) federal funds for covid relief were poured into city govs coffers and they decided to spend it on skateparks (among many other things). C) The long economic boom that started around 2010-ish is finally seeing its way into public coffers D) the Olympics is affecting city council level decisions or the federal gov is earmarking money for skatepark development E) more city council members rode a skateboard when they were younger and are more open to it than city council members of yesteryears F) the stigma around skateboarding has faded because it is a bunch of old men and we've lost that edge we once had.
I'd bet on skaters being old and knowing how to work the political process a bit better and a greater likelihood of city council people less hostile to skateboarding because they "were skaters when they were young." We are starting to matter as a voting block and starting to be able to relate to those in power. And, for any parks built this year or next year, we'd see a small covid bump of federal funds that city needed to "use or lose."For my anecdotal evidence that it is skater activism at the local level:
Vancouver is going to spend 20 million on skateparks. A big reason behind this seems to be Jeff Cole's advocacy work. "Cole, a longtime skateboarder and president of the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition has been pushing for this for a long time."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-skateboard-amenity-upgrade-1.6482224Finally, skateboarding is dying. Neither covid nor the Olympics are going to change that. Covid slightly boosted the public's interest in skateboarding, but it is still nothing compared to 2008. The Olympics created a huge blip, but it was very very shortly lived. The Olympics did not sky rocket snowboarding's popularity and it will not skyrocket skateboarding's popularity. Snowboarding has only gone down in terms of Google searches since it was introduce into the Olympics.
Using Google search web searchers and shopping searches, I believe skateboarding is dying (or is already a zombie activity) and the Olympics did nothing for snowboarding (and will do nothing for skateboarding, except in China's sport training camps).
See example 1:
Skateboarding a search term:
See example 2:
Skateboard as Google product search term:
See example 3:
Skatepark as a Google search term:
See example 4:
Skate shop as a Google search term:
See example 5:
Snowboarding as a Google search term:
Note:
https://trends.google.com is a fun website. And, when making my graphs I extended the timeline as far as possible and looked at things at worldwide scale rather than a specific country.