Cindy’s first big skateboarding competition was the freestyle 1978 Hang Ten Skateboard Olympics at Magic Mountain in Valencia. As confident and trailblazing a person as she was (and is), the prospect stressed her out big-time. She had a vision for how she wanted her routine to unfold, but since her management wasn’t attending to what she saw as very important details, like music, she decided to handle them herself. She also decided that she did not want her friends or family to attend because she believed that their presence at the event would stress her out even more. Thankfully they defied her wishes and took a ton of pictures that ended up being the only documentation of this seminal moment in her skateboarding career. Skaters from all over the country participated in that competition, and among the women Cindy came in third place. She participated in many other competitions after the Hang Ten Olympics and became one of the top-ranked professional female vert skateboarders in the U.S. for pool riding and half-pipe. She was also the first professional female skateboarder to be sponsored by Puma and skated professionally until 1982. Right around this time, skate parks across the country started closing down because parents would sue them whenever their kids got hurt. Cindy decided to “get a job, figure out ‘real life’ and move on.” After attending UCLA briefly, she found work as a production assistant on several movies and also worked in Mattel’s photo studio. She eventually took a job as a stylist at a magazine called Swimwear Illustrated, which was based in the Bay Area. The magazine was launched by the creator of Runner’s World and served as a great training ground for what would eventually become Cindy’s professional niche. After working there for only one year, Cindy moved back to the South Bay and landed an agent in Los Angeles who connected her to styling gigs across the area. Cindy began working on print commercials, catalogs and editorial spreads for companies such as Toyota and Volkswagen. Sports were still Cindy’s passion, however. After a few years her photographer boyfriend (who would eventually become her husband) helped her reexamine her focus. With his support, she came to the realization that she wanted to focus her expertise on sports—even though she was working with some of the biggest companies, actors and musicians in the world. Her agency dropped her when she told them her decision, and Cindy became a free agent— finding gigs on her own. She coined and trademarked the term Sports Stylist® and has worked with some of the top sports photographers
in the world for clients like Nike, Adidas and TaylorMade Golf. But a love for skateboarding never left Cindy, and even though she stopped competing, she never stopped skating. In 2012 she embarked on a renegade adventure that propelled her back into the public eye. Remember “Carmageddon II,” that dreaded final weekend in September 2012 when portions of the 405 Freeway were closed for construction? The royal inconvenience that had most of Los Angeles planning their Netflix queues for the weekend got Cindy and her husband, Ian Logan, strategizing how she could skate down an empty 405 Freeway. On the morning of Sunday, September 30, police were stationed at every on- and off-ramp of the 405. As they drove around the Sepulveda Pass near Getty Center Drive, Cindy and Ian got pretty discouraged. They were about to turn around and head home when they saw it: a hole in a fence and no police cars in sight. Cindy recalls that her husband told her to run up onto the freeway and just start skating. She did, and he caught the whole thing on film. They jumped back into their car after only a few minutes because there was a police car stationed at the next exit. After they got home, they downloaded the images and put one on Instagram. Their use of the hashtag #carmageddon resulted in their post being seen by The Huffington Post, which broke the story shortly after. Soon after, other big media outlets like CBS, ABC, NBC and ESPN were broadcasting the story as well. One day Cindy and Ian found themselves talking to the creative director at skateboarding company Dusters California. The creative director posed to Cindy the idea of designing a skateboard with Dusters’ parent company, Dwindle—one of the world’s largest skateboard manufacturers. Cindy said yes, excited by the prospect of designing a board for girls since there were so few on the market. She even created the artwork. Shortly after it launched, 200 of those boards sold out on the Vans Warped Tour in less than 20 days. The board began getting a ton of press, with stores clamoring to carry it. And because Dwindle’s distribution is worldwide, Cindy’s board started showing up as far away as China and Japan, where girls carried it like a purse. A skateboard shop in the Middle East picked it up too and sent Cindy a picture of a local girl holding it. Startlingly, the girl in the picture wasn’t covered in a hijab but simply standing in the shop—no differently than a Western girl would. Cindy was blown away by the implications of the image, as it exemplified how in places where females are limited by social mores and punitive laws, skateboarding is serving as a vehicle for rebellion and
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