Stay On Board: The Leo Baker Story traces an Olympic skater's gender journey
A documentary examines the professional risks Baker faced in order to embrace his personal truth
“Change is difficult” is a generally accepted truism that’s rarely understood so potently as by those who go through experiences so transformative that they’re literally making the choice to come out the other side as a different person. This is a common experience for many transgender individuals, whose choice to pursue personal fulfillment often has consequences to their perception in the world and their place within it. Nicola Marsh and Giovanni Reda’s Stay On Board: The Leo Baker Story rather elegantly captures the turmoil of social transition, following one skateboarder’s journey to self-fulfillment despite the pressures placed upon him by gendered expectation.
Leo Baker came to prominence in the women’s skateboarding scene from a young age, earning him acclaim as one of the most noted athletes in the field and cementing a spot on the first-ever Olympic skateboarding competition in 2020. The problem, of course, is that by then he had already figured out that he was a transgender man, living a dual life: privately, he could be called by his chosen name and correctly gendered by friends and family; publicly, his career depended on the brand recognition of his birth name and status as a “woman” skateboarder.
Primarily filmed in 2019 in the run-up to the Olympic games, Stay On Board follows Baker through this escalating personal and professional crisis, where he’s adored by the world under a name that elicits pain, and terrified by what he stands to lose by embracing authenticity. The historic pride of being one of the first Olympic skateboarders is an opportunity that will never come around again. But the psychological burden of acquiescing to fan and sponsor expectations only compounds with time. The division between personal truth and public persona becomes an ever-widening gap that threatens to break Leo’s career, but much more importantly, his sense of self.
Marsh and Reda never try to present Leo’s story as anything more than a biographical snapshot of this pivotal period in Leo’s life, relying on talking head interviews with his friends, family, and professional acquaintances to bridge thematic gaps between footage captured from following Leo around. Still, they strike upon some immensely relatable aspects of transgender experience through the specificity of their portrayal. Leo speaks to the pressures exerted on him from a young age, creating a developmental response to embrace femininity—not merely in the usual ways in which kids are divided by gender, but as a direct consequence of being embraced as a young woman in sports.