Ryan Sanabani is the Freedom of Skating Personified

If you are not familiar, The Players’ Tribune is a website that is dedicated to letting athletes speak their minds for themselves. Sure, it usually means working with a ghostwriter, but that’s the ostensible premise. They also produce videos, and they recently started a series called Strive. Strive is about athletes persevering over obstacles, which is definitely the case in the first episode, which is called “Why Skateboarding is Now a Political Protest.”

The episode focuses on Ryan Sanabani, a skateboarder who had to flee his home country of Yemen due to a civil war. Sanabani can’t go back to Yemen, but he’s still skating. Now based in the United States, he has plans for his future, for skateboarding and beyond.

If you want to know more about the Yemeni skater’s story, watch the first episode of Strive in the video above.