The World Skateboarding Tour made landfall in Argentina this week for our first Park event in Latin America on the road To Paris 2024.

The Pocito skatepark at which the contest is currently taking place lies on the outskirts of San Juan close to the Chilean border, and was constructed in 2019 as part of a wider sporting mega-project that includes both a neighbouring soccer stadium and cycling velodrome. The wide open plain on which San Juan sits is framed by the spectacular backdrop of the Andes mountains which form a natural border with Argentina’s westerly neighbour, meaning that as well as being occasionally windy it can also get cold surprisingly quickly when the sun dips and you can also effectively find yourself standing in a cloud which has come rolling down over the mountains.

While that may be news to the skaters arriving from other continents, the Latin American contingent who made up probably the majority of the 160 entrants were better acclimatised to the changeable conditions and seemed quicker to get to grips with environment in which the contest was taking place. As well as Argentinians there were Chileans, Mexicans, Colombians, Peruvians and a large, noisy Brazilian contingent who always bring the atmosphere with them and really got the event started. Despite having blazing sunshine during the practice days, Women's quarterfinals saw the twin challenges of elevation (the skatepark is 640 metres above sea level) and an early finish due to Argentina's youth football team playing a home game in the Bicentennial Stadium next door. Although the threatening rain held off, atmospheric moisture had to be dried from the surface of the park before the female quarterfinal and it is a testament to all involved that this phase was wrapped up in time before the stadium next door began to fill up ahead of the game. In a bizzare twist, the mist gave way to something close to a tornado overnight and it was touch and go whether the men's quarterfinal would take place at all the next day but after a morning's delay to let the anger of the wind ameliorate it was all systems go.

By quarter-finals time we had already experienced both daytime temperatures which had began to soar to energy-sapping levels and freezing fogs just 24 hours apart. The difference which conditioning makes at this level began to tell. It is worth remembering at this juncture that unlike the days of ‘turn up and skate on the Sunday’, World Skate events are typically a week in length from first practice to prize-giving. The physical demands of skating a 45 minute-practice and then those lung-bursting 45-second runs which typically involve between 10 and 14 tricks each day are exhausting enough, but you throw searing Andean heat and shivering mists into the mix and you quickly realise why hangovers and cigarette smokers are thinner on the ground at contests these days.

Notwithstanding the obvious stoke of having so many entrants getting their moment to show what they can do in open qualifiers, you certainly notice the energy levels increase as the cut distills the field of skaters and not just the standard but the intensity of competition begin to rise. Certainly this was the case today in San Juan, and the crowd noise rose in parallel in a kind of symbiotic spiral of radness.

Be sure to join us live for the semi-finals and finals on Saturday and Sunday and see for yourself- in the meantime, here are the results from both quarter-finals to give you a sense of what may lie ahead!

WST San Juan 2023 Park Women's Quarter-Finalists

1) Sky Brown

2) Yndiara Asp

3) Raicca Oliveira

4) Dora Pereira

5) Ruby Trew

6) Lilly Stoephasius

7) Ruby Lilley

8) Kokona Hiraki

9) Charlotte Heath

10) Ninano Kusaki

11) Arisa Trew

12) Mei Sugawara

13) Erica Leguizamon

14) Kihana Ogawa

15) Lilly Strachan

16) Naia Laso

WST San Juan 2023 Park Men's Quarter-Finalists

1) Keegan Palmer

2) Jagger Eaton

3) Steven Pineiro

4) Tate Carew

5) Pedro Quintas

6) Luigi Cini

7) Yuro Nagahara

8) Keefer Wilson

9) Augusto Akio

10) Tom Schaar

11) Pedro Barros

12) Danny Leon

13) Liam Pace

14) Andres Mariano

15) Kieran Woolley

16) Gavin Bottger