Our return to Rome raises the question of whether there can ever be a skateboarding equivalent of home advantage.

The World Skateboarding Tour emulates other professional sporting tours in that it mixes new destinations with fixed stars of orientation. Tennis is always going to have Wimbledon, Roland Garros and Cincinnati among whatever new destinations they bring the sport to. Golf will always feature Augusta and Saint Andrews.

For the WST, Rome is a fixed star thanks to two excellent venues for both Street and Park- and the guarantee of Italian hospitality toward visitors, which is never less than magnificent.

The reason why the question is raised comes from an interesting observation about how the European Park teams are evolving over time. 

Historically, if we can use that term in reference to the World Skateboarding Tour, the strongest European team in Park has been Spain, three of whom (Danny Leon, Naia Laso and Egoitz Bijueska) have won a Tour stop. 

For the purposes of comparison, the UK has one in Sky Brown (albeit a three-time winner in UAE, Argentina and Brazil) while France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Portugal are yet to produce an outright Tour-stop winner despite well-established, inter-generational skateboarding scenes going back decades at this point.

France have improved notably since Tokyo 2020, as we discussed in our Currents feature on them, with Tom Martin and Noe Montagard proving capable to mix it at the highest level, while Nana Taboulet’s results have shot up over time.

Low-key, as the youth say, Italy have however been quietly bolstering their ranks since the days where local hero Alessandro Mazzara did most of the heavy lifting for his nation alongside Alex Sorgente. 

In Edo Poggio and Guglielmo Marin, they have found their equivalent of France’s two young contenders in Men’s, while gradually introducing Greta Samaritani and youngster Gaia Antogoni in the Women’s division. Rafael Tomé has also given them a cutting edge at the top end of the leaderboard.

Today in Men’s Qualifiers, they debuted two new finds in Mattia Murroni and Francesco Uguccioni- both of whom are better than they have any right to be at their tender ages.

The Spot skatepark has been pivotal to the development of these emerging talents and has seen the Italian team mushroom in just a handful of years. 

While many teams can- and do- travel here to practice outside of events, it seems clear that The Spot is proving to be a wellspring for domestic skateboarding talent in a country not historically considered to be a competitive skateboarding powerhouse when compared to their giant European neighbours.

Nations wishing to lay down long-term foundations for future participation in this Olympic discipline take note: on Italy’s evidence, if you build it then they will appear.

Allora: let’s take a look at what else we saw of note today.

A quick pivot to our Asian entrants and three standouts in Heat 4 were temporary leader Yongyan Ku from Chinese Taipei (last trick- blunt heelflip out in the deep end!), China’s Yongchao Zhang who left it to his last run to complete a run, but was an out-of-time Rodeo off a much better score, and his fellow countryman Ye Chen- who as well as being creative and imaginative was also tanking it around the course and just missed a last-trick caballerial heelflip indy which would have bumped him way up. Nonetheless, three super impressive standouts, there.

Speaking of standouts, 13-year old Platon Chirva is an absolute natural- remember the name- while in the ‘apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ department, Yuro Nagahara’s younger brother Izuru made his WST debut today, doing 8-foot-plus grabless backside ollies over the vertical hip which were beyond buck.

Stories from the top end of the heats tonight include OQS Shanghai winner Tate Carew fail to make it out of Qualification for the first time ever, Hampus Winberg go from a potential exit to going top with a killer final run, and Pedro Barros looking something like close to his demonic best with two full runs to proceed in comparative comfort. These are your 32 going forward to meet the 8 pre-seeded skaters on Friday.