Hello from the Qualifier stage at 2023’s WST Park World Championship here at the Spot skatepark in Rome’s seafront Ostia neighbourhood!

The qualifiers stage at World Skateboarding Tour events is what you might consider a ‘turn-corner’ pivot: the cut is pretty severe. From 70 women and 117 men, only the top 27 of each division proceed to meet the top 5 pre-seeded in each group by virtue of their current Official World Skate Ranking. (The rationale behind taking the pre-seeding from OWSR ranking rather than last contestt results allows people to miss individual contests without affecting their standing).

With 187 skateboarders entered (from 37 countries around the world) vying to make the cut, the' bubble'- as it is known- hovered around the mid-to-high sixties (65-ish for men, 68 for women), meaning that some better established names fell just outside the line: Oski Rozenberg for men and Yndi Asp for women both found themselves just south of the border this time around.

At the top of the leaderboard lay two no lesser surprises.

Men’s first place qualifier Yuro Nagahara threatens to be the final piece of the Japanese clean-sweep jigsaw (they already have Olympic gold medalists in Women’s Park and both Men and Women’s Street); in first place in Women’s qualifier is relative unknown Naia Laso, who is spearheading something remarkable coming out of Spain.

In terms of national representation qualifying for tomorrow, USA did best with12 skateboarders going through (4 men, 8 women), Brazil followed up strong with 9 (6 male, 3 female) and Spain have sent no less than 8 through (a 4/4 split), leaving Australia next with 3 (1 man, 2 women).

So the sun sets on a gruelling couple of days here on the Roman coast; most of the skateboarders, whether qualified or not, seem to have high-tailed it to the beach a couple of blocks from the skatepark.

Tomorrow is a new day, when the intensity is only set to increase. We will keep you posted on the outcome of those quarter-finals here!