Watch: British Olympian Sky Brown performs skateboarding tricks on the Thames

Sky Brown, Team GB’s youngest-ever Olympic medallist, briefly brought Tower Bridge to a standstill on Tuesday when she performed a series of skateboarding tricks on the River Thames.

The 15-year-old, who won the World Championships last year and will be aiming to improve this summer in Paris on her Olympic bronze medal in Tokyo, had flown into London from her Los Angeles base for a series of media and commercial engagements.

They included skating on a floating four-metre half-pipe nestled between two double-decker buses against the backdrop of London’s Tower Bridge. Brown’s performance included a demonstration of the ‘Japan Air’ move, a trick which involved pulling the board behind her back while flying above a half-pipe that will be donated by the Swiss watch company TAG Heuer to the charity-run Flo Skatepark in Nottingham.

“I was hyped to get involved,” said Brown. “Being able to share my passion for skateboarding with the public is something I love to do.”

Brown failed earlier this month in her ambitious quest to become the first Briton in more than a century to compete in two different sports at the same summer Olympics after missing out on a qualification spot in surfing.

She had competed in the World Surfing Games in Puerto Rico but cannot now accumulate sufficient ranking points to qualify for an event that will take place this summer almost 10,000 miles away from hosts Paris in Tahiti.

The logistics of combining surfing with her primary Olympic sport of skateboarding would have been hugely challenging but Brown had regarded it as a realistic target and is now targeting the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

Brown, who lives and regularly surfs in California and has a Japanese mother and British father, is currently ranked third in the world in skateboarding, an event that will take place in Paris this summer on the Place de la Concorde.