Houda Ait Lahcen, a 21-year-old skater from Tameslouht, experienced significantly more backlash than Koutten. “Tameslouht is a rural mountain village in the Marrakech-Safi region of Morocco,” Lahcen explains. “People are very conservative in the village. They expect women to spend their time at home and get married at a young age.” She took up skating when she was 15, though she initially hid her newfound hobby from her family. When her father finally found out, he was extremely angry. “He shouted at me and told me I should be ashamed for practising tricks with boys in the village,” Lahcen recalls. It also became commonplace for people to verbally harass and criticise her for skating in public. Aya Asaqas, a skater from Rabat, tells a similar story: “Random people on the street would ask me why I was hanging out with boys,” she shares. “They would tell me that I would get scars and ruin my skin whilst skating, which would mean no man would want to marry me. My family found it very hard to accept.”
Despite these challenges, all three girls continued to skate, their resilience fuelled by their love for the sport. “When I am skating, it feels like I am meditating,” Lahcen says while laughing, her voice as buoyant as the scene she describes. “Then suddenly you fall and you have to get back up. It is a good sport to teach you life lessons.” Determined to ensure that other girls would not have to face the resistance she did, Lahcen is now dedicated to shifting people’s mindsets towards Arab and North African women on wheels. “I post a lot of my work online, so I can show how great skating is, and also be a female role model for younger girls,” explains Lahcen, who was named African Skater of the Year in 2023, and also set up her own organisation, Tifrkhin Skate, to empower fellow female Moroccan skaters. “We host competitions,…
