2025 has been a year for breaking records and new heroes on the World Skateboarding Tour, from Gui Khury's ceiling-shattering performance to Ibuki Matsumoto's breakout victory in Japan to Egoitz Bijueska's heroics in Italy; the Paris Olympic Games are now just a memory, as the work of building the Road To LA28 begins.

For us here at World Skate, that meant as well as welcoming Brazilian superstar Leticia Bufoni to the fold, we also introduced a minimum age threshold for both Park and Street as we begin the countdown towards Los Angeles.

Our WST Rome double-header in June saw not only the highest-ever Park score but the first 900 ever landed in a Park contest worldwide as the tempo continues to increase relentlessly, while our Street contest in the shadow of the Colosseum will be best remembered for Brazil’s Giovanni Vianna bringing pandemonium to proceedings with his NBD (never-been-done) Caballerial Bennett grind in Best Trick. 

WST Rome also saw us host both former and current IOC presidents Thomas Bach and Kirsty Coventry as well as representatives of LA28, who were treated to an atmosphere like no other in glorious Italian sunshine.

The big development story of 2025 has been in Skateboard Judging as evidenced by our seminar in Turkiye, interview with the host of our Saudi symposium, introduction of our ‘Noted By The Head Judge’ series, hosting of upcoming judges at WST Rome and launching episode 1 of our Judging Education And Development program, in which continental judges put frequently asked judging criteria questions to our Head Judges to better clarify how judging is best understood both for competitors and judges moving up through the ranks.
All this important content is available courtesy of our World Skate Skateboard Judging Education Youtube Channel, where more insight and guidance is being uploaded all the time.

Staying with Judging progression, we also began to introduce you to our first successful ISJC Level-1 inductees courtesy of our Certified interview series: meet David Lestrade, Jakub Michalski, Daniel Liu and Yi Ting Lui with just a click, and expect more to come in the New Year!

Coaching also made important advances in 2025 beginning with the release of our Development Strategy, which led directly to the creation of the World Skate Certified Education Provider accreditation. As part of our Coach Education and Accreditation System, this scheme begins the task of raising minimum Coaching standards worldwide and supporting best practice by creating advancement opportunities for talented coaches to learn and share.

Coaching symposia were held in Benin and Singapore at the request of their relevant authorities, while 2025 also saw us roll out an expanded Development Scholarship Program in conjunction with Olympic Solidarity.

A total of sixteen skateboarders, seven coaches and five judges from sixteen different countries have been accepted as part of the initial program activity- which launched in November with a training camp at Woodward East in the USA. 

As part of our commitment to providing a voice and a platform for all our participants be they skateboarders, coaches or judges, we also gave the floor over to Viktor Solmunde, Arisa Trew, Keet Oldenbeuving, Tate Carew, Filipe Mota, Minna Stess, Francesco ‘Jekill’ Albertini, Vincent Milou, Chany Jeanguenin, Egoitz Bijueska, Daniela Terol, Gio Vianna, Funa Nakayama, Jussi Korhonen and Greg Rodriguez in the form of interviews.
Get to know these solid gold humans better just by clicking on their names- and if you would like a deeper dive into the teams they represent, you could do worse than our Currents series- looking at Brazil, France and Japan- to begin with.

As well as the WST, we also endeavoured to bring you coverage from the Junior Pan-American Games in Paraguay as well as National Championships from both the UK and (for the first time ever) Ireland- if you are a National Governing Body and would like us to cover your National Championship events, just get in touch!
Also adding to the stoke of 2025 was Skateboard Slalom’s magnificent Judi Oyama being inducted into the Guinness Book Of World Records thanks to her unbroken skateboarding career, stretching back into skateboarding’s first golden era.

If WST Rome Street was an intense affair, WST Kitakyushu at the end of the year was all-time: not only did Sora Shirai retain his WST winner’s crown in emphatic style, but compatriot Ibuki Matsumoto won her first WST stop at only the third time of asking in the best Women’s Street contest to date- bar none.
With the success of the first-ever international skate event on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, that country seems likely to feature heavily in the future of the international circuit- both as participants, and as hosts.