Inline skate

Inline skating is a form of roller skating, differentiated by the positioning of the wheels on the skate. On an inline skate, three to five polyurethane wheels are mounted in a straight line (hence "in-line" or "inline"), providing maneuverability more akin to ice skates.

Although inline skate designs were invented as early as the 18th century, and one version was patented in France in 1819, their use was relatively unknown until the early 1980s. In 1979, Scott Olson and Brennan Olson of Minneapolis, Minnesota came across a pair of old inline skates and, seeing the potential for off-ice hockey training, set about re-designing the skates using modern materials and attaching ice hockey boots. A few years later Scott Olson began heavily promoting the skates and launched the company Rollerblade, which name many people often use when referring to inline skating, no matter what brand of skate they use.

For much of the 1980s and into the 1990s, inline skate models typically sold for general public use employed a hard plastic boot, similar to ski boots. But in about 1995, "soft boot" designs were introduced to the market, primarily by the sporting goods firm K2 Inc., and promoted for use as fitness skates. Other companies quickly followed, and by the early 2000s the use of hard shell skates became primarily limited to the aggressive skating discipline.

The growth of inline skating in the United States was explosive in the early 1990s, but from about 1996 on sales dropped as the market became saturated and the sport's trendy status began to fade. Among children, inline skates were supplanted in popularity by new designs of push scooters; meanwhile there was a resurgence in the popularity of skateboarding among young people.

However, inline skating's status as a fitness activity among adults remained healthy, and in the early 2000s, inline speed skating event organizers began to more successfully promote inline marathons to that audience. The largest inline racing event of the world is the marathon in Berlin, which had more than 9000 skating participants in 2003. The NorthShore Inline Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota is the largest inline skating event in North America, with over 4000 skaters attending the September event.

In addition to speed/fitness skating and aggressive skating, the biggest inline sport is inline roller hockey. Also popular is inline dancing, especially at such locations as New York City's Central Park, where inline and "quad" roller skaters may congregate. Other inline sports include roller soccer and inline basketball.

Among skaters not committed to a particular discipline, a popular social activity is the group skate, in which large groups of inliners regularly meet to skate together, usually in an urban setting on city streets. Although such touring existed among quad roller skate clubs in the 1970s and 1980s, it made the jump to inline skates in 1990 with groups in San Francisco, California, and New York City, with in some cases hundreds of skaters regularly participating. In the late 1990s the group skate phenomenon spread to Europe and then to east Asia. The weekly Friday night skate in Paris, France, is believed to be the largest in the world and has at times had as many as 20,000 skaters participating on a single night. The Sunday Skate Night in Berlin also attracts over 10,000 during summer, Munich, Frankfurt and Amsterdam host other popular events. For some group skates in both North America and Europe, Halloween is the most popular event of the year.