The Ollie is one of the very first tricks you can learn at wakeboarding. It’s an easy jump on the water and you don’t need any prerequisites for it, but you should be able to ride savely already.
For the first tries you can do the whole trick under the running wire. A lot of riders intuitively try to pull up both feet at the same time. But this doesn’t work, and if you try this, you will have the feeling as if you are stuck to the water.
Instead, you need to pull up the nose of the board, so your front foot, first. If you are a Goofy rider, so if you ride with the right foot forward, then pull the right leg first and if you are a Regular rider, so you ride with the left foot forward, then you pull up the left leg first. Imagine that you want to rise up the nose of board, so it is perpendicular to the water. The higher you pull up your leg, the higher your Ollie will be.
While you pull up your front foot, you need to press down with your back foot and build some tension. If your front foot is almost at the highest point, then jump of your back foot and pull it up as well. Pull the back foot up, until your board is parallel to the water. Don’t Overdo it here, because then the nose of the board will dive into the water first and that’s gonna hurt.
So, if you notice, that it’s going downwards, you can keep your board parallel or even try to land on the tail.
The Ollie needs a lot of practice to get the right timing on the jump of. But you can try to improve your timing all the time while riding your laps.
If you have a good feeling for this, you can also ride to the outside to gain a little bit of speed and then do your Ollie. This way you can jump significantly higher.
A lot of riders feel that it helps, to let go the back hand before you do the Ollie. This way you are a little more dynamic and can’t rotate in the air.
If you still want more height, you need to do a Pop. This means, that you stomp on the water with your front foot first, before pulling it up. The Nose of the board will automatically jump out of the water again. Use this momentum to pull up your front foot. Thereafter, you do the rest of the process as described. Still, I wouldn’t recommend starting off with the Ollie Pop, because there are too many things to focus on your first attempts.
Once you mastered the Ollie you can try to jump over bojs or obstacles. But above all, the Ollie is the foundation of a lot of other tricks, so that you should start trying it, after doing some different starts and the Switch.
