Followers of the World Skateboarding Tour will already be familiar with our longstanding relationship with the city of Rome .
For those people I will keep this part of the introduction brief, but as we are bringing onboard new fans every day, let me take a paragraph to bring everyone up to speed.
We have just arrived back in Ostia, the only part of the greater Roman municipality which touches the (Tyrrhenian) sea.
The World Skateboarding Tour has made Rome a fixed star of the circuit due in no small part to the presence within the greater municipal region of two world-class skateparks: The Spot here in Lido de Ostia, and Parco Colle Oppio slap-bang in the city centre (about which more next week).
All photos: Mark Dillon
Beyond merely being a skatepark, The Spot is a community regeneration project which has brought not just new energy but palpable economic benefits to a district which has perhaps not felt the economic uplift of mass tourism which the urban heart of Rome has.
Now- it's easy to gloss over that fact, but let me take a quick diversion to shine a little light on the wider project World Skate have been instrumental in developing and which grows larger annually in terms of community outreach from our events here.
In the past few weeks, skateboarding comic books have been distributed through schools across the city, while Olympian and local hero Alessandro Mazzara has been visiting some of those same schools in the parish throughout the weeks running up to this World Skateboarding Tour 2025 launch event, sharing his inspirational story and encouraging Roman youth to get involved.
The fanzone, created and managed by the local event organizers, includes a mini ramp, micro-mini ramp, a skate-surf wave if you're into that sort of thing, and a 3 on 3 basketball court.
During the course of this coming week over four hundred schoolkids are being bussed in to watch, try and enjoy skateboarding culture and all the great things that it brings with it. Isn't that wonderful?
As you might imagine, right at the start of the week we are really only hitting stride with practice but- and you have to love skateboarding for this- the 'open jam' format second heat of women's practice had to be abandoned in favor of named drop-in turns, because everyone was snaking like crazy.
If that seems a bit fun police-y to you, the wisdom of this approach was later demonstrated when an unheeding Yam Behar and Luca Karhu back smith'ed into one another going opposite directions at full speed and were very glad of the helmets they were wearing, subsequently.
What else to tell you? 180 skateboarders from 40 nations are registered to rip, despite us being the furthest distance time-wise from an upcoming Olympic Games as possible in terms of the WST.
Everything else is in position : the weather is glorious, the beach at the bottom of the road is packed with sizzling Romans, and we are set fair for another colossal ding-dong here this incoming weekend.
Join us if you are in town (admission is free) and follow the action live here if you can't.
Between then and now, lock down your aerials on this frequency for more news, gossip and updates as the qualification rounds progress toward what is always a rowdy climax here in Ostia this weekend.
The World Skateboarding Tour is back for 2025: join us !