If, as the Washington Post’s former president and publisher Philip L. Graham is believed to have said-  journalism is ‘the first rough draft of history’ then it certainly was the case for our São Paulo World Championships held in the Brazilian metropolis early this month.

Simply put, too much happened in such a short window to be able to fully process or relate everything worthy of note in real time.

These As It Was features benefit from the perspective and distance of a little dust-settling: not only to digest all the drama, but also to let all the photography filter through.

Photography is silence in a noisy world; while video may command the attention, photography tells the stories within.

In the first instance, Women’s Street was the most fortunate of the four World Championships from a weather perspective and was characterised in no small part by the tumultuous reception received by Gabriela Mazetto upon her return to the World Skateboarding Tour from a year’s hiatus.

It should come as no surprise that the Brazilians get behind their own, but even with that said she had a triumphant return and her flick on Kickflips is looking sharper than ever. Although twelfth place is not a Tour-best result for her, she should be well pleased with her re-entry at the top level in the world- which this absolutely is.

At the risk of re-iterating the point to death, what makes the World Skateboarding Tour different from the invitational skate contests is that the stories beyond the podiums carry their own resonances- and, in some respects, those are equally if not more engaging than just who won outright in each division.

By way of example: France’s Lucie Schoonheere made it into her first-ever WST finals in Brazil. It is hard to convey just what a psychological breakthrough progressing to a new round of elimination can be for the first time: for starters, it’s a whole new day of skateboarding by which I mean that it doesn’t matter if you just scraped it with a Baker-maker yesterday, because each day is a total reset from quarterfinals onward.

For established names, that means they have to repeat yesterday’s performance. For those who find themselves in a new tier for the first time, there is less to lose. The experience itself is reward enough, but with the halving of the field every day even coming dead last in your new day of skateboarding is fine.

For Lucie to have come 6th, then, is Rather A Big Deal and testament to the fact that if you give it all and ride your luck anything can happen in skateboarding. Big names often don’t even make it out of Qualifiers at WST events, so Lucie has broken some sort of ceiling for herself, there. The same could also be said of Thailand’s Vareeraya Sukasem who only narrowly missed out on making it into her Street finals- but a personal-best 9th place will have done her self-belief no harm at all.

Nor was Lucie alone in the French camp experiencing her first finals- teammate Max Berguin repeated the 6th-place-in-first-finals performance in Men’s Street, and in so doing solidified himself as a bankable cornerstone for a team which had not had a Men’s Street finalist in three years up to then. Noseslide Nollie Flip out on the hubba ledge every single time, with flick and catch.

Also in his first Men’s Street final was Japan’s Daiki Ikeda who is fascinating- alongside teammate Keyaki Ike (12th place, personal best)- in the sense that for neither of them is the World Skateboarding Tour their skateboarding priority. They both just have so much natural talent that, like USA’s Alex Midler and Canada’s Cory Juneau, they can hold their own at the highest level through sheer greatness and force of will. Whether at this level that is enough to win is a different matter, but it sure does make them exciting to watch.

To continue with our ‘first finals’ theme, the real shaken snow-globe of a final was Men’s Park: USA’s Taylor Nye had the slingshot performance of his World Skateboarding Tour to date: having only ever made semifinals once before back in Sharjah in early 2023, he qualified out of semis in Brazil right on the 8th-place ‘bubble’ spot, and ended the day just over a point off podium in 4th. The fact that only he and Keefer Wilson were able to complete their opening runs gave an early indication that this was going to be an unorthodox Finals, and so it would prove.

As Eduardo Dias noted the day before Park concluded, gesturing toward the stands: “Tomorrow night this will be like Wembley”- and sure enough it was. Victory would be decided in a two-horse race between tough Basque 15-year-old Egoitz Bijueska- who was already one tooth and two heavy slams down on the deal- and Florianopolis local Kalani Konig, who you may recall made it to the finals in Ostia 2024 but got hurt in the warm-ups.

There was a sense that he would seize this moment and indeed had one of the great performances of his discipline so far on the Tour, twice leading and bringing bedlam to the stands. He was usurped with the last golden run by the Spanish man-to-beat, but in truth skateboarding won there because we got to witness two all-time performances head-to-head.

Women’s Park- as you may be aware- caught the wrath of the weather gods, and it really is a credit to all of the finalists how they stayed locked and loaded as the rains came and went.

The return of Sky Brown to the World Skateboarding Tour is always something to celebrate because she has that extra edge in her boned inverts and tweaked grabs that allows her to slice through the top end of the leaderboard which is usually bunched out by Japan’s Cocona Hiraki, Hinano Kusaki (and, increasingly these days, Mizuho Hasegawa) alongside Australia’s Arisa Trew and Brazil’s Raicca Ventura.

She invites them all to raise their game- and while Arisa in particular will probably curse her luck in not getting a third run where she usually puts her foot down on the power-up accelerator, in truth either of Sky’s first two runs were enough for her second World Championship victory come the end of Run 2 for everyone. Women’s Park Finals were also notable for seeing both USA’s Lilly Erickson and Spain’s Julia Benedetti make their first Sunday night appearance on the WST, the latter clearly riding through some considerable pain having fallen foul of the centrepiece rainbow rail in the process of qualifying.

Again we will never know what might have materialised for them with another Run each, but for the USA particularly, having the same number of finalists as Japan in Women’s Park just before the Road To LA28 kicks off will no doubt be a welcome direction of travel, especially with Minna Stess returning to the podium once more.

On balance, even with the weather playing its hand towards the end, the São Paulo World Championships were an overwhelming success for everyone involved- especially the açai woman, who will have bought herself a speedboat with the money she made over the course of those seven skateboarding days in Brazil.

Once again we must thank all the Brazilian skateboarding community for their hospitality and energy.

It really is something to behold.