Madrid

First things first, because the name misleads people: Madrid Skateboards has nothing to do with the Spanish capital and isn’t a shop. It’s a Californian board brand, founded on 6 January 1976 by Jerry Madrid — the founder’s surname — and it still presses its own wood in its own Huntington Beach factory. The house line says it all: “California crafted since ‘76”.

History

Jerry Madrid started out in the late sixties shaping surfboards in his parents’ garage in Norwalk, California. When the surf went flat he and his friends took to the pavement, and he ended up applying surfboard lamination techniques to the crude “sidewalk surfers” of the day. He registered the company in 1976 while working as a firefighter, a job he kept until 2005.

The contribution that earned him the Skateboarding Hall of Fame’s Icon Award in 2026 is modern concave. In the late seventies a manufacturing error left him with a batch of warped boards; instead of scrapping them he skated them and found the slight curve gave far better foot placement and control. In 1979 he released some of the first production concave molds, and that became the industry standard.

Through the eighties the Huntington Beach factory was known as “The Farm Team”: it pressed boards for Santa Cruz, Alva and Sims while developing its own pros. That era produced the two things Madrid is known for outside skateboarding: the Valterra board Marty McFly rides in Back to the Future (1985), which Madrid manufactured, and the Vans x Madrid Fly, the industry’s first co-branded skate shoe. The two brands did it again in 2016 with the “Flypaper” Sk8-Hi Pro, marking Madrid’s 40th and Vans’ 50th anniversary. The replica boards seen in Stranger Things come out of the same factory.

The team

Madrid runs two separate teams. Street: Daniel Yeager, Blake Smith, Chris Massie, Phillip Ceja, Arjun Shah and Maya Kenny. And downhill, with international racers including Zak Maytum, Cam Brick, Adrien “Frenchy” Paynel, Justin Rolo, Rydelle Abarico and Oscar Archibaldo Rodriguez. From the past there are names like Mike Smith, Eddie Elguera, Claus Grabke, Gary Sanderson and Beau Brown, whose models are reissued in the Heritage line.

The boards

The catalog splits three ways. Heritage is eighties shapes reissued — 9.5” to 10.75” wide and only 29 to 31” long: Explosion, Rampage, Shaman, Thruster, the Mike Smith Ape. Street is conventional popsicles. And Longboard covers downhill and freeride, the side of the business that has grown most. All of it is pressed in Huntington Beach: in 2019 the plant was around 7,000 square feet with a dozen-odd employees.

Who it’s for

If you want a modern street popsicle, there are more obvious picks. Madrid makes sense for pool, transition, cruising or downhill, if you want a wide period shape, or if you want the actual Back to the Future board rather than a knock-off. It also makes sense if you care that the wood comes out of a company-owned US factory instead of a generic press.

Line it up against the rest in the deck catalog.