- Started from the bottom now we’re here. Japan is skateboarding benchmark
- Yuto Horigome is leading the japanese skateboarding revolution
It’s one of the biggest changes inside an urban sport, the Japan’s landing into the skateboard competitive scene is a reality. They’re good, tech, consistent and no one can’t stop them.
Now it is well known that skateboarding was born in the U.S.A. and the American skaters have been leading the competitions with a big gap between all the rest of the world contenders. Brazil and European countries are the historic regions where some talent appeared and battled against the American skaters but, since the last 5 years there’s a country claiming for the throne of skateboarding and apparently it’s moving the U.S.A to a secondary position in terms of competitive results.
How is this possible? Easy, a national long term plan with the Tokyo Olympics as a main goal.
Filming a video part is such a long time effort for the riders, lot of weeks, months and even years of footage end up as a 5-10 mins video where usually the spectator cannot know or see how hard is to bring these content to them. We just can say congrats to these three for the hard work.
And here appears the AJSA: All Japan Skateboard Association
The behind of the great success of Japanese skaters, there is the existence of the AJSA program. Before this project began, Japanese skaters had no support from any organizations. If they wanted to succeed in skateboarding, they had to put themselves out there by themselves which is quite hard. So AJSA started the program to support the skaters who want to skate in other country’s competitions.
The AJSA’s main activities include the training and educating the instructors who like teaching kids and juniors the basic steps of safely enjoy skateboarding, and holding six Am and five Pro contests per year plus participating several events involves Skateboarding.
The results of this program are now real and the list of riders participating in the best skateboarding finals around the world is growing every year. One of the peaks were the 2020 Tokyo Olympics celebrated in 2021 due to COVID-19 Pandemic where the gold medals both stayed in Japan.
We can’t stop rewatching this video part, with some Barcelona spots included on it. Barcelona is a must on every single video part.
Three years and a foot injury took Shecks to film this video part. This is a self success proof about Ryan and his love for the sport. This is skateboarding!
Horigome and Nishiya reigning champs
Yuto Horigome, the number one in skateboarding nowadays. Unique and flawless style, bunch of unique tricks and a sometimes non-human consistency are some of the qualities of Yuto.
He is one of the contenders in every single contest, he is being leading the SLS, TampaPro, Dew Tour, Xgames and the most important one the first ever Olympic gold medal in street skateboarding. Horigome in mens and also Momiji Nishiya claimed for the women olympic gold medal and Funa Nakayama completed the collect with a deserved bronze medal. This moment was the peak of the japanese skateboarding project. A successful country effortness to push and grow a sport and ump from the irrelevance to the top of skateboarding.
Ginwoo Onodera, the young riders who collected a silver medal in th Extreme Barcelona 2022, Sora Shirai, Daiki Ikeda, Aori Nishimura and Yumeka Oda are also some of the great talents who are joining some of the most important finals in the main world skateboarding events.
Next Stop is París 2024, will Japan still be in the top?
One year to know the answer buddies.
