Will These Sensational Skateboarding Tricks Win Japan Olympic Gold?

Horigome, who won the first gold in Olympic men’s street skateboarding in Tokyo three years ago by landing four high-scoring tricks, leads a class of elite Japanese male skateboarders who thrive on innovation.

He and his peers distinguish themselves by creating unique tricks that merge a variety of styles. Many of these tricks are so difficult that competitors are unable to replicate them.

In one example, the Japanese skater Sora Shirai’s “cab sugarcane” at a recent Olympic qualifier fused two intricate tricks, a “caballerial” and a “sugarcane.” The judges gave it a score of 97.07, at the time the highest for a trick at such an event.

It’s hard to pinpoint why Japanese skaters have dominated professional skateboarding over the past six or so years, or why they are so good at tricks. Team Japan clinched the gold medal in both men and women’s street skateboarding in Tokyo.

“It’s like the famous definition of pornography: You know it when you see it,” Jonathan Russell Clark, the author of a 2022 history of the sport, said of Team Japan’s technical prowess.

“You can just tell that they’re doing something that the other skaters aren’t doing, even if you can’t explain it and have no idea about the technical specifics,” he said.

Japanese female skaters have shown similar strengths at Olympic qualifiers as the men: They score high in tricks but are less consistent in runs. But the women are less vulnerable to the rule changes, as they perform better than their competitors in both parts of the competition.

But a scoring change introduced after the Tokyo Olympics could curb that dominance – and their ability to win medals in the street skateboarding event.

If the men’s “street” competition at the Tokyo Olympics had been scored using the new Paris format, Kelvin Hoefler of Brazil, who finished second, would have won gold.

Horigome would have had to settle for bronze.

The street event consists of two 45-second runs and five standalone tricks over an obstacle course. The tricks are scored based on a skater’s two best standalone tricks, and risk and innovation are often rewarded.

To ace the run section, a skater must land a large number of tricks – not necessarily difficult ones – consistently.

At the Tokyo Games, if an athlete did well on standalone tricks but scored relatively poorly on runs, both run scores were automatically erased. That’s what happened in Horigome’s case.

But in Paris, one of those runs will count toward a skateboarder’s score no matter what.

World Skate, an international body that sets Olympic skateboarding rules, changed the format for Paris after convening a committee to analyze results from Tokyo. The general feeling was that the format did not sufficiently capture the sport’s full breadth and diversity, said Luca Basilico, World Skate’s skateboarding director.

Ian Michna, the publisher of the skate magazine Jenkem, said he welcomed the new format.

“A run shows how consistent the skater is, how they skate stylistically, and gives you a much wider view of what they are capable of,” he said.

But that may pose challenges for Team Japan because its runs during recent Olympic qualifiers were not especially consistent, a New York Times review of results data suggests.

Even as Japanese skaters landed the best standalone tricks, the Times analysis found, their run scores lagged behind those of their top competitors, particularly those from Brazil and the United States.

American and Brazilian male street skaters were generally stronger than their Japanese counterparts on runs because they executed more tricks, fluidly and continuously, across the obstacle course.

By contrast, Japanese skaters often began and ended their run sequences with high-skill tricks that impressed fans but risked damaging their overall scores.

Here’s an example from a post-Olympic competition in Rome two years ago.

Horigome landed only seven tricks during his run, and failed to land his most difficult one.

But Nyjah Huston, a decorated American skater, landed over 10 tricks across a variety of obstacles. Some of those tricks were relatively easy, but his overall score was higher.

It’s possible that the format change won’t affect Team Japan’s performance in Paris.

Basilico, the World Skate representative, said that the change had been “done for the sake of representing skateboarding the way we believe it should be represented,” and not to target specific athletes.

Liz Akama, a member of the Japan women’s team, said she was not worried about the scoring change.

Akama said that high-scoring, standalone tricks are not her forte. The format change has allowed her to focus more on perfecting tricks she can already land, including ones that could be used in her runs.

“Although the rules have changed, everyone is adapting,” she said.

Case in point: Horigome won the Olympic qualifier in Budapest last month partly by delivering a diverse, nine-trick run that looked similar to Huston’s 2022 performance in Rome.

Shirai and a Japanese teammate, Ginwoo Onodera, finished second and third.

Several experts predicted in interviews that Team Japan would excel in Paris because the country’s best street skaters have proven their versatility in competition after competition.

Horigome also won this year’s Tampa Pro, a street event where the scoring is based entirely on runs.

“I think they’ll do incredibly well again, and they always will,” said Kevin Harris, a Canadian ex-pro who has deep ties to Japan’s skateboarding community. “They’re producing the best skateboarders on the planet.”