Life and death at the speed of content
New year, old stuff. Fabiana Delfino and Braden Hoban lose sponsors, we gain an understanding. Nyjah Huston fractures his skull, and more.
The definitive weekly ranking and analysis of all the skateboarding and other things online that I cannot stop consuming and how it makes me feel, personally.
What'd we miss
Rank: 2026
Mood: 🎉🍾🥂
Wow, 2026. Here it is, here we are. If the last nine days have been any indication, it will certainly be another year.
A lot has also taken place in the skateboarding world since the last Simple Magic "Simply Ranked" Friday Post, post-marked December 12, 2025. It's here in this weekly edition that I opine about and make hay over the day-to-day happenings in the sport and culture, and there have been many happenings as of late, some quite substantial. That gap in schedule didn't mean I stopped posting, mind you. A blogger must blog, and by god did I:
Cole Nowicki
Cole Nowicki
Cole Nowicki
Well, I did stop at one point when I took a week off from the newsletter entirely, which I, for some reason, haven't done in the four-plus years of doing this thing. It felt great. Want to know what I did during that break? I read a bunch of cultural theory and started and finished The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. What a rush. I hadn't played the game since it came out over a quarter-century ago — can you feel the fissures of time split apart your understanding of the self?
But enough about me. The skateboarding. There was skateboarding and skateboarding-related things that happened, remember? The biggest news of the break is that Thrasher named Chris Joslin its Skater of the Year, which rankled and elated the masses, and inspired some of the stupidest among us.
Griffin Gass released an incredible video part, as did Daniel Lutheran, which may have been his last big effort as a professional(?) skateboarder. Thrasher uploaded a, frankly, remarkable "rough cut" of Nyjah Huston's Disorder Skateboarders Distress video part, in which he again shows that he operates at a level where fracturing your skull (SFW) can happen at any time.
Storied did a decent feature on the 25th anniversary of éS Footwear's Menikmati, a film deserving of celebration, and a celebration produced by Storied that didn't exclusively feel like a ruse to sell some terrible skateboard decks, but is also exactly that. What else... Instagram informed me that Jordan Mourning is incredibly good at skateboarding. The worst generative AI slop trend came for skateboarding's deceased legends. Living legend Paul Rodriguez revealed himself to be a flatground grunter. Some friends of mine premiered and uploaded an excellent new video called Dumb Bunny, which you should watch if you haven't already.
And Sunday would have been David Berman's 59th birthday, which isn't skateboarding-related but should be recognized nonetheless.
Luke O’Neil
Alright, there's gotta be some more...
Comings and goings and who gets to know
Rank: -2
Mood: 🤝👋
As tends to happen around the New Year, the contracts of a not insignificant amount of professional and amateur skateboarders — who are career independent contractors and typically signed to multiple deals with various hard and soft-goods companies to serve as promotional representatives — expire without being renewed. Sometimes by choice, other times not.
From the public's vantage, that change can be acknowledged quietly, as Braden Hoban did when he recently removed the Emerica Footwear handle from his Instagram bio and Emerica subsequently removed Hoban from their team page. Or maybe there's a brief acknowledgement, like in Fabiana Delfino's Instagram Story from January 2 that read, simply:
I no longer ride for
Etnies 👟
Thanks to all.
Peace & Love
Occasionally, there are hard posts and mutual appreciations shared. In rare instances, splits get messy, and mud is thrown, sometimes long after the fact, such as when Shane O'Neill bizarrely responded to an Instagram meme post about Ish Cepeda being let go from his company, April Skateboards.
The public rarely receives any insight into the whys or hows behind these decisions, which naturally leads to speculation. That speculation regularly turns toxic, as the comments on any sponsored skateboarder's Instagram posts will demonstrate, and this theorizing, while fun at times from a fan perspective, can work to devalue both the skateboarder and their former sponsor, fairly or unfairly.
That limited communication makes sense, to a degree. These roster changes are sensitive, and by that turn, matters of Public Relations, and details are usually kept close to the vest to protect both brand and skater. It becomes something of a catch-22. Say nothing and people will talk; say something and you're drawing attention to a thorny issue — PR problems 101.
Other professional sports announce signings and releases with a cold regularity, typically in stiff PR speak (or scoops shared in a syntax understood by many). Still, it helps the public stay up to date and curbs (some) conjecture, even if it leaves athletes, brands, and organizations open to criticism for those decisions. I'd argue that's a better alternative than having the industry and its machinations remain an inscrutable black box.
The big, obvious differences here are that the skateboarding industry is a disparate network of hard and soft-goods companies, not, say, a league governed by serious monied interests or one with a media apparatus large enough or designed to cover developments of that nature. The vast majority of the brands and skateboarders I reach out to about the state of their professional relationships do not respond or decline to comment. Which, again, as precedence goes, is not unusual.
That's why it was surprising (and refreshing) to hear back from a representative of the Nidecker Group, parent company of Etnies and Emerica, who shared the companies' reasoning for the departures of Delfino and Hoban in an email.
Regarding Fabiana, we didn't reach an agreement on the upcoming contract, and unfortunately we parted ways. We're big fans of her and her skating, and we wish her the best of luck in her upcoming projects and career.
Braden’s contract ran its natural course at the end of the year. This wasn’t abrupt or reactionary — it was part of a longer-term renewal conversation that’s been ongoing since mid-2025. We’ve explored a few different options together along the way, but Braden was clear that he only wanted to ride for Emerica and preferred to see his deal through to its conclusion, which we fully respected.
Delfino and Hoban did not respond to my request for comment, so there could be additional details, but from the Nidecker side, that all sounds pretty standard. That doesn't mean their decision-making can't be criticized (last year, Etnies released Chris Joslin, who ended up winning Thrasher's 2025 Skater of the Year), but even this kind of boilerplate statement allows for media and fans to have more informed, and ideally, healthier conversations about these types of news stories.
Let's have more of that in 2026, please.
Life and death at the speed of content
Rank: 22
Mood: 📱💨
When I was 12, I broke my arm trying to frontside 50-50 down a legitimately tiny skatepark rail. As far as my recollection of the event goes, I overshot the grind and slipped heelside onto the far side of the rail. On the way down, my left arm, presumably already flailing, struck said rail and snapped.
The day I got my cast off, I remember coming home, marvelling at my pale, shrivelled limb, and having a frighteningly strong and unsettling urge to smash it over the stucco-covered column standing at the entryway of our house. I didn't do it, thankfully, and my mother breezily told me that urge was the devil's doing. It wasn't, of course, it was just the pull of one of the most human desires we've got: To see what's the worst that can happen.
It's that same ping of morbid curiosity that compels some of us to hover over videos of wanton violence in our social media feeds. It's what made me watch, despite telling myself I shouldn't and agreeing with myself on the matter, the slam that fractured Nyjah Huston's skull. I wish I hadn't. I've been unable to push the image out of my mind ever since.
Violent is the most accurate way to describe it. Catastrophic also works. Life-changing, too. If you missed Huston's online updates after spending three days in the ICU following that attempt to feeble grind a 22-stair handrail, you would not be wrong in assuming his life ended then and there at the end of a shaky vertical video. It is the worst bail I've ever seen someone take on a skateboard. More shocking than Jake Brown's multi-storey plunge on the Mega Ramp, more disturbing than the innumerable other stone-cold knockouts we've witnessed professional skateboarders suffer.
The spectre, the possibility, of this ruinous outcome is a part of skateboarding; it's in the implicit contract you sign when you step on a board. That is, whether we openly admit it or not, part of what makes it so exciting to do and to watch. Risk becomes central to the narrative of someone like Huston's skateboarding: these are the highest-level stunts possible, meant to leave us in awe or watching through our fingers if they go awry.
This week, we saw Alexey Krasniy step to and ride away from the giant metal hubba in Spain that took out Wade Fyfe in Kurtis Filippone's 2008 independent film Strange Brew (the bail is not for the squeamish, but Fyfe's section is excellent).
Wade Fyfe in Strange Brew, Alexey Krasniy in PISSDRUNK's FORGHTABOUTIT
Almost two decades later, it feels like something approaching redemption for someone to succeed where Fyfe was concussed. To appreciate that narrative arc is to recognize that danger, which can turn to unmitigated violence in an instant, is a cornerstone of skateboarding's cultural storytelling. The scars criss-crossing most skateboarders' bodies connect us to it. Hopefully we don't get hurt too badly. Hopefully we get to tell those stories ourselves.
What makes Huston's injury all the more disquieting is that the footage appears to have been taken by a bystander, who then uploaded his near death to social media, where it went viral. The cruelty of the injury is compounded by the cruelty of contemporary society, where someone else's trauma becomes not just your content but an opportunity.
To twist Baudrillard, and also reference him in a time he astutely presaged, you might call this the triumph of the virtual over the real. "At a certain speed, the speed of light, you lose even your shadow. At a certain speed, the speed of information, things lose their sense," he wrote in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The speed of content has separated us from our shadow and our senses.
Thankfully, Huston survived, and this incident becomes another of the countless reminders of the risks these skateboarders — professional athletes — take for our entertainment. Many for little to no pay. Huston is one of the few pro skateboarders who has done well enough that he could step away after something like this and make do financially. It would be understandable. Advisable. He can afford healthcare. Not everyone is so lucky.
Despite all of these words talking around it and whatever urge you may be feeling, I suggest not watching the clip. There are enough horrors out there already. It can always get worse.
Speaking of worse...
Rank: -2026
Mood: ☠️
Have you seen the new Lakai apparel drop?
lol, via @youwillsoon
Something to consider:
Samer Kalaf
Good things:
Nelson Phillips
Another good thing:
George Cutright
That's right, another good thing:
Josh Sabini
A theory of content as governance:
Charlie Warzel
"The Trump-Flavored Content Administration" by Cooper Lund.
Ryan Broderick
Good thing as a palate cleanser: Jonathan Smith has an excellent interview with Bobby de Keyzer over on Hypebeast.
To me, it just feels irresponsible to make that kind of classically-structured video again. I’ve made myself a name, and I’m at the liberty of doing what I want. I think there’s a responsibility that comes with that. I’m trying to bring some professionalism back to skate videos. I think about how the video will come out. To just be like, “Well, I have three minutes of footage that I filmed at CBC. We could make a classically-structured video of just lands…” That’s not why I do it anymore.
Ben brings his shovel:
A Bubble goes to Vladimir thing:
Until next week… it can always get better.
Laser Quit Smoking Massage
NEWEST PRESS
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A collection of essays that I think you might like. The Edmonton Journal called it a "local book set to make a mark in 2024," The CBC said it's "quirky yet insightful" (lol), and it won Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2025 Alberta Book Publishing Awards.
Book cover by Hiller Goodspeed.
Right, Down + Circle
ECW PRESS
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I wrote a book about the history and cultural impact of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater that you can find at your local bookshop or order online now. I think you might like this one, too.
Photo via The Palomino.
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