The pandemic has been especially tough on small businesses, with many shutting their doors and others going downhill. The latter has been just fine for Fairfax Surf Shop.

That’s because the store near Washington, D.C., caters to skateboarders as well as surfers. When most social activities are considered unsafe due to Covid, what’s something fun that has very little risk of transmission? 

Skateboarding. Shredding down a hill with the wind in your face is the antithesis of masking up. 

“I can say with absolute certainty that skateboarding kept this place going,” says Jackson Riedl, 25, who works at the shop. 

He continues: “I’ve seen the numbers, and while I don’t want to say them publicly, I can tell you the pandemic was a boom for us.”

This trend extends nationwide. By the end of 2020, U.S. skateboard sales had jumped 75 percent compared with 2019, according to ActionWatch, which records the numbers.

“It wasn’t just kids and families,” Mr. Riedl notes. “It was older guys who skated back in the day and were getting back into it — guys in their 40s and 50s. They had been stuck home all day and couldn’t go to a concert or football game so they decided to take up riding again.”

There was a time in 2020 when the sales boom collided with supply-chain shortages and missing workers. Some shops were out of boards, trucks, wheels, or bearings — the “hardgoods” of skateboarding. One plant, BBS, was forced to shut down temporarily due to Covid. Now, though, it’s producing 10,000 boards a day, double that of four years ago.

There is also evidence that riding has given a boost to mental health amid the pandemic era’s isolation and depression. In January, a University of Exeter scholar, Paul O’Connor, released a study outlining  skateboarding’s  benefits. 

“Skateboarding provides a serious emotional outlet for people who have experienced personal trials in the collapse of long-term relationships, career challenges, parenthood, and substance abuse,” Dr. O’Connor reported. 

He told the Independent: “For those I spoke to, skateboarding was more than about looking after physical health. On at least two occasions when I asked informants to try to explain what skateboarding meant to them, I was confronted with grown men fighting back tears, literally lost for words in grasping to communicate the importance and gravitas of their pastime.”

Like jazz, movies, and comic books, skateboarding is one of America’s great original art forms. A $5 billion industry with 16 million adherents in the United States, skateboarding fosters community, physical grace, and freedom.

It has also, despite its reputation for attracting laid-back surfers and countercultural urban thrill seekers, been a wellspring of entrepreneurship. In 1971, a Virginia Tech student named Frank Nasworthy turned $700 he earned from a restaurant job into the Cadillac Wheels Company, formed to produce a new model of wheel. He was soon selling 300,000 sets a year.

More recently, Carver Skateboards of Venice, California, patented a new truck design for their boards. The video history of the company’s trial-an-error period should be shown at the Wharton School of Business. A cross between Edison and the guys from the “Jackass” films, Neil Carver and his colleague crash, roll, and tumble onto sidewalks as they perfect their invention.

“It’s just the perfect pandemic sport,” says Mr. Riedl at the skate shop. “There’s no locker room, no crowded court or county club. You just grab your board and go outside.”