Vert has played an important role in the development of skateboarding around the world in some unexpected ways. It is one of skateboarding’s oldest disciplines, having being born in skateboarding’s second wave of popularity during the 1980’s and predominantly in California.
As a division of skateboarding it waned in popularity during the street skating explosion of that era which in turn brought skateboarding around the world, and later lost ground to transition skaters who favoured the complexities and challenges of skatepark terrain during the second golden era of the skatepark which grew up since the millennium.
All photos: Kenji Haruta
The interesting thing about Vert, however, is its constancy. In the intervening lets say 40 years since Vert skating really began to take off, Vert ramps themselves have not changed very much. Riding surfaces may have improved, channels and extensions (although rarely tombstones these days) may add some changes to the lips, but on the whole it remains just two walls and nowhere to hide.
In a sense Vert is skateboarding’s most Catholic iteration: it requires discipline, endless commitment, courage and patience. Unlike Street or Park, there have been no design revolutions or sub-genres: just 40 years of two walls and human endeavour. And yet the remarkable thing is that as an art form it has continued to progress: Gui Khury, CJ Hawker, Reese Nelson, Mizuho Hasegawa and a phalanx of others are continuing to take this dangerous and challenging discipline into new and exciting spaces.
There can be no doubt at this point that Vert and Park skateboarding have both fed into one another: when you see someone blasting on the extension at a Park contest, that is Vert training. They are just pretending for a moment that the concrete wall is a Vert ramp. Conversely, the explosion in Park skateboarding has led a lot of Park skaters to realise that Vert is the pure undistilled essence of that weightless touching of the void they are seeking.
Particularly in Women’s skateboarding, Park has acted like a funnel into Vert to the point where rather than having individual female Vert skaters included in sessions and demos, female Vert is finally its own standalone division. You get the feeling that a threshold has been crossed from which there is now no way back in terms of the establishment of women’s skateboarding across the board (if you’ll pardon the expression).
So: on this beautiful hillside park overlooking one of the world’s great cities we have more than 60 Vert skateboarders entered from all around the globe including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, UK, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Sweden and USA- as well as no fewer than five Italians holding it down on home turf. The ramp here in Rome is classic in its dimensions: 12 feet high, 2 feet of vert and 32 feet in width (even in these metric days, Vert dimensions are still always measured imperially, for reasons lost to the mists of time). There a couple of small extensions at either end of the second wall and a wide channel on the first, as well as a retractable ‘floating coping’ which is deployed for the Best Trick section- and that takes us onto the contest format.
Debuted in Buenos Aires at World Skate Games 2022, the Vert World Championship format has actually appropriated the Street format: one best run (of three thirty-second opportunities) and the two top scoring Best Tricks (of five attempts, each of which has to be done within four walls). This allows for the parameters both of consistency and progression to be pushed and makes for a super spectacle for the crowd- you don’t need to understand anything of the complexities of skateboarding to appreciate JD Sanchez doing a grabless nollie bigspin heelflip 4 feet out of a vertical plane (which he totally did).
So with all that said, the stage is set for a golden skateboarding event to kick off the World Skate Games 2024 in Rome.
Be sure to tune in live online on Saturday 7th September if you can’t make it here in person!