Will these sensational skateboarding tricks win Japan gold at the Olympics?

Horigome, who won the first gold medal in the men’s street skateboarding event at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago by landing four high-scoring tricks, is the leader of a group of Japanese male skateboarders who thrive on innovation.

He and his colleagues distinguish themselves by creating unique tricks that merge different styles. Many of these tricks are so difficult that competitors cannot imitate them.

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

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

“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 just see that they are doing something that the other skaters are not doing, even though you can’t explain it and you have no idea of ​​the technical details,” he said.

Japanese female skaters have shown similar strengths in Olympic qualification as the men, scoring high in tricks but being less consistent in runs. But the women are less vulnerable to the rule changes, outperforming their competitors in both parts of the competition.

But a points-counting change implemented after the Tokyo Olympics could curb that dominance – and their ability to win medals in street skating.

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

Horigome had to settle for bronze.

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

To master the running component, a skater must perform a large number of tricks – not necessarily difficult ones – consistently.

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

But in Paris, one of those runs definitely counts towards a skateboarder’s score.

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

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

“A run shows how consistent the skater is, how he/she skates stylistically and gives you a much broader picture of what he/she can do,” he said.

But that could pose a challenge for Team Japan, whose performances during recent Olympic qualifying matches have been inconsistent, according to an analysis of the results by The New York Times.

The Times analysis found that while Japanese skaters performed the best tricks on their own, their scores lagged behind those of their closest competitors, particularly those from Brazil and the United States.

American and Brazilian male street skaters were generally stronger than their Japanese counterparts in running, as they performed more tricks smoothly and continuously on the obstacle course.

Japanese skaters, on the other hand, often began and ended their runs with tricks that required a lot of skill and impressed fans but negatively affected their overall score.

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

Horigome only managed to gain seven strokes during his run, missing the most difficult one.

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

It is possible that the change in format will not affect Team Japan’s performance in Paris.

Basilico, the World Skate representative, said the change was made “to represent skateboarding the way we believe it should be represented,” and not to target specific athletes.

Liz Akama, a member of the Japanese women’s team, said before the Paris Olympics that she was not worried about the scoring. (She won a silver medal on Sunday.)

Akama said high-scoring, standalone tricks aren’t her strong suit. The format change has allowed her to focus more on perfecting tricks she can already land, including tricks she can use in her runs.

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

Case in point: Horigome won the Olympic qualifying competition in Budapest last month, thanks in part to a varied nine-trick sequence that resembled Huston’s performance in Rome in 2022.

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

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

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

“I think they’re going to do incredibly well again, and they always do,” said Kevin Harris, a Canadian ex-pro who has close ties to the Japanese skateboarding community. “They produce the best skateboarders in the world.”