The weekend has arrived here in Italy and with it traffic jams headed towards the beach where we are located as Rome’s citizenry take advantage of some wall-to-wall sunshine.
Mindful of the soaring daytime temperatures and our international broadcast audience, we elected to start semifinals in the evening.
Women’s semifinals kicked off proceedings and began with long evening shadows drawing in over The Spot skatepark.
Heat 1 started fairly chaotically with a lot of broken first runs and what looked like big-game nerves from Chinese newcomer Xiuqiancheng Han drawing to a close what had been a superb debut for her up until then.
Nonetheless, the experience at this level will be her reward and expect to see her return with more poise soon.
If Heat 1 had a motif it was the usually guaranteed Cocona Hiraki needing her final run to bank a full 45 seconds-worth of action- which I suspect may be the first time that has ever been the case on the WST. It was one of those heats.
Lillian Erickson’s recent run of good results came unstuck courtesy of a heavy Run 2 slam, and in fact out of Heat 1 only Cocona survived the Heat 2 onslaught to stay in the game for Sunday’s final.
In doing so, she traded places with compatriot Misugu Okamoto, who became the only skater in Heat 2 not to advance, but 14th place on your return after half a decade of not skating at all says something.
Other than Misugu, Heat 2 was business as usual for the elite of Women’s Park: by the end of Run 1 most of the heavy hitters were already home and dry, with the only patchy performance being Mizuho Hasegawa who needed her second run to reach safety.
So not a shootout as yet, but Sunday seems likely to bring the cranked-up performances as the big guns go head to head.
Two things to note: all 8 finalists are returning finalists this time around, and the fact 7 of the last heat are in the final 8 shows how consistent both their skating and the judging between rounds is.
By way of contrast, Heat 1 of Men’s semifinals was outrageous in terms of early markers being set down. Gui Khury squeaked into the quarters by holding back some of his harder tricks but didn’t make the same mistake in semis: two runs north of 90, both featuring 900’s, booked his place in the finals with no doubt and set the tempo for everybody else to chase both in his own heat and the one following.
As a result, Heat 2 was a finals all of its own.
Issei Sakurai put down the 3rd-highest score to date on the WST to knock a very in-form Pedro Barros out of the cut, before USA’s Luke Kahler put down the run of his life so far with his final but narrowly missed the cut just because of the insane standard of the runs prior.
As Mitchie Brusco pointed out, a couple of years back a run like that run could have won- now it wasn’t quite enough to make finals.
With all the hallmarks of an all-time classic, Heat 2 saw a further onslaught because of the early benchmarks set down- but story of the night beyond Gui’s heroics had to be Italy's own Guglielmo Marin’s last-gasp rocket ride into his first-ever WST final.
Having only made semis once before, the current Italian national champ from Turin found a sixth gear for a run which brought pandemonium to the full house spectating.
From a statistical viewpoint- and certainly from a skateboarder’s perspective- Saturday’s Men’s contest was the best semifinals on the WST to date.
Six scores above 90 at semifinals stage in Park was unheard of on the World Skateboarding Tour up until Saturday night - and we still have Sunday’s finals to come.
