Throwing $20 beers on the course
Deathwish's life extension, SLS in Paris, the SBA has gone and made some shit up again, postcards from Bordeaux, 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.
Deathwish's life extension
Rank: 1
Mood: 📛
We've always sort of been waiting, haven't we, for the skaters of GX1000 to finally, what, move on? Graduate? That's not quite right, is it, because the GX1000 canon is, well, canon, and the skaters who make it that are cemented in the sport's contemporary DNA, having provided us with some of the best and most fear-inducing videos of the last decade, even if the lack of titles in those videos made deciphering who those skaters are a trick in itself.
In a way, that anonymity, if we're to call it that, was part of the underlying, unspoken appeal: Here's skateboarding done the way skateboarding should be done: for yourself and your friends.
Still, it is both comforting to see their abilities get rewarded with paycheques and fascinating for someone like the uber-talented Chris Athans, the San Francisco-based long-lined, impossible-wrapped, high-speed wall-riding maestro, to wind up on, of all places, Deathwish Skateboards. A brand that exists in the same universe and warehouse as the ever-relevant Baker Skateboards, but still spiritually and aesthetically feels like the home of Lizard King, which is not a slight, just an observation.
That said, as I've written previously, the creative direction at Baker Boys stays fluid, and by extension, mostly on point.
Baker Skateboards is... one of the few — and perhaps the only — legacy board brand that has managed to not just maintain relevancy, but excel decades after its launch. To be fair, I don't know what their financials look like, but in terms of popular sentiment and quality of media output, they rarely stumble.
That's partly because they understand the need to Refresh and Stay Moving. That starts with the team.
That has also begun to extend to Deathwish, who have now added Athans, the phenomenal Yuri Facchini, whose bag of tricks and on-board style at times look like the Hulk to Chet Thomas' Bruce Banner, and Sean O'Connor, who is perhaps the most classically Baker-coded of either company's recent roster additions.
And those refresh efforts bear out just as well in Deathwish's latest video, Introducing, as they have in Baker's, such as Gimmie a Break! That may be in part due to the videos sharing a similar tight, pared-back editing style, lighter on b-roll, but deploying it where it feels most impactful, providing us quick flashes of personality from the skateboarders on screen.
In the most complimentary sense, for a company called Deathwish, they sure seem committed to extending its life.
A picture-perfect(?) sporting moment
Rank: 0.4
Mood: 🎾🛹
While I threatened to attend Street League Skateboarding's Paris event last week, I ultimately did not make it to Stade Roland-Garros, the home of the Parisian Grand Slam and its famous clay court, which California Skateparks paid homage to with the design and colour scheme of Saturday's course.
Catching up on the replay of the livestream broadcast the next morning, it was clear that I missed a fun event, complete with upsets, flameouts, questionable judging, and feel-good moments.
Rayssa Leal, perennial favourite and SLS's winningest competitor in the women's division, wouldn't make it through to the finals, where Chloe Covell seemed primed to take home gold after two solid run sections. Aoi Uemura had other plans, overcoming a dismal showing in the run section with a diverse arsenal in "best trick," including a high-speed Bennett grind on the bump-to-box, to take home the victory.
The men's final would also see its fair share of dramatics. Two-time Olympic champion and multi-time SLS victor, Yuto Horigome, appeared to hurt himself at the beginning of his first run attempt and would never recover, stumbling on the second, and failing to make any of his best trick attempts, closing out the finals with a total score of 3.0.
Elsewhere, curious judging abounded, as the highly technical Giovanni Vianna showed visible frustration after receiving consistently low scores in the run and best trick portions of the event. At one point, during the run section, Vianna would bail on his second trick, after making the first, call it, and receive a score of 0.3. Just previously, Nyjah Huston ate complete shit on his first trick attempt in the run section, called it, and received a 0.4. To underline that sequence of events, Huston received fractions of a point for not landing a trick.
Elsewhere, France's Vincent Milou was an absolute pleasure to watch. He made incredible, tasteful use of the course, finding interesting routes, and plugging in risky moves like a straight no-comply over the kicker-to-kicker and boosted frontside-heelflips on the flatbank in between his anchor tricks. The delight in witnessing him skate was almost enough to forgive the pretty obvious home cooking he was getting from the judges.
His first run attempt was phenomenal, but ended on a missed blunt-kickflip-fakie on the quarter pipe. Still, he was mere tenths of a point off from Sora Shirai's mind-boggling runs, which really bring into stark relief how good and consistent modern-day skateboarders have become.
In best trick, Milou rode away from a kickflip-frontside-tailslide on the large gap-to-rail feature and scored an 8.6, despite planting both hands on the ground in what would even be egregious for a Baker maker. Shirai executed a perfect backside-sugarcane on the same obstacle and scored an 8.8.
Scoring issues be damned, Vianna would muscle his way back into contention with a fakie-frontside-180-backside-5-0 and Caballerial-nosegrind down the medium-sized rail, holding onto a shaky first place. All it would take was one big trick from Milou, who the hometown crowd was going absolutely wild for, to usurp him. Milou had already tried to kickflip-frontside-noseblunt-to-fakie on the gap-to-rail twice, and had come close, but all came down to his last attempt.
This is where the stakes and tension and perfect sporting moment come into view. Two seconds would be the dividing line between a moment to remember for the home crowd and heartbreak for their fashionably dressed champion.
Spoiler: he made it. He landed it so well that the crowd took it as a done deal, victory sealed, and started pelting the course with their drinks in celebration. A mortified Milou begged them to stop, as Shirai had one last attempt and was himself well within striking distance of the win.
In the end, the fans were correct; that was that. Shirai bailed, Milou, consistently a second-place finisher, finally made it to first, in his home country of all places. The stadium erupted. It was a special scene, and a solid showing for SLS, even if it was constantly interrupted by advertisements for Power Slap.
Cole Nowicki
Speaking of competitive skateboarding
Rank: ...
Mood: 🤷♂️
Last month, I wrote about the Skate Board Association (SBA), a forthcoming competitive skateboarding league fronted by the Golden State Warriors' Gary Payton II and managed by his business partners Sheldon Lewis and Royce Campbell. The SBA has teased the inclusion of big-name skateboarders, promised to open up its draft at the end of this year, and to start holding events in early 2026. That also includes promises of substantial (for skateboarding, anyway) contracts for competing skaters, endorsement deals, and so on.
Cole Nowicki
As they're positioned, those are all positive sounding things, as is the SBA's recent announcement of legendary skateboarder and Hall of Famer Jaime Reyes coming aboard as a "team owner."
However, there are still a number of unanswered questions and genuine concerns about the SBA detailed in the above piece. Some of which include Lewis' past attempt at a league, which sold tickets to an event that never came to fruition and allegedly failed to refund ticket holders, and the organization's official Instagram account sharing what looks to be a glowing pullquote from a Sports Business Journal article on the SBA, but is actually just a low-effort fabrication. No such article exists.
I previously reached out to the SBA with a request for an interview and was directed to a PR lead, who never responded.
Considering this well-documented sloppiness, you'd expect the SBA to button things up as they get closer to their inaugural season. You'd be wrong. On Thursday, the SBA posted a promotional video to their Instagram account. The quality of the edit leaves a lot to be desired, sure, but it also includes this strange, highlighted quote attributed to Senior ESPN writer Alyssa Roenigk.
Via the Skate Board Association on Instagram.
"This isn't just an idea. It's already happening!"
Roenigk reported on the launch of the SBA for ESPN in early September. I reached out to Roenignk to confirm if the quote was indeed hers, and she replied with a link to her original reporting, saying that is all she has written about the SBA. Nowhere in the piece does that quote appear.
If you're the SBA, why would you, once again, poorly fabricate easily debunkable coverage such as this? And not only that, but tag ESPN in the Instagram post?
Is it pure hubris? Brazen ignorance? Straight-forward laziness? Whatever it is, it's strange. And if that wasn't enough, they also shout out ShreddER News, which is a whole other thing.
Still, this doesn't mean that the SBA isn't real or won't hold events, but it certainly continues to raise some eyebrows.
Swing up
Rank: 1,375.64
Mood: 😡
It was Easter, and my older brother James had gone and taken my haul of little chocolate eggs and medium and large-sized chocolate bunnies. We'd spent the morning hunting for them throughout the little bungalow we shared with our mother and stepfather, who had stuffed them in the corners and creases of the house the night before.
As the younger brother, I'd had enough experience being teased and bullied, forced to be the guinea pig for any number of stupid stunts James and his friends would cook up. However, watching my brother laugh as he bit the ass off my wide-eyed, milk chocolate rabbit was a breaking point. I walked up to him and swung. Being seven or eight years old, I was not very tall, so I struck him in the throat, and he began to choke and cry and gasp for air. He never took my chocolates again (not because he died, he was fine).
This memory came to me as I attempted to buy two tickets to see the band Geese in Vancouver on October 25. Long sold out, the only available tickets were through the app's "verified" reseller feature. Those two tickets, which, from looking around online, couldn't have been much more than $50 to $100 each originally, were now going for a total of $1,375.64.
Just days earlier, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said this, per Variety:
“Music has been underappreciated,” Rapino said, especially compared to sports. “In sports, I joke it’s like a badge of honor to spend 70 grand for a Knicks courtside [seat]. They beat me up if we charge $800 for Beyoncé.”
He added, “We have a lot of runway left. So when you read about ticket prices going up, the average concert price is still $72. Try going to a Laker game for that, and there’s 80 of them. The concert is underpriced and has been for a long time.”
America's Federal Trade Commission is currently suing Ticketmaster and Live Nation for unfair ticket practices, including allegations that the companies collude with scalpers to inflate prices. While promising on its face, that case was brought by the previous government. The current American administration does not give a shit about the common consumer, and is happy to lean whatever direction the money flows, as another note from Variety points out.
In a possibly related move, Live Nation named Richard Grenell, the controversial Trump-appointed head of the Kennedy Center, to its board of directors in May.
In reality, the solution is simple: it should be illegal to resell tickets for more than you originally got them, as even high-profile producer Jack Antonoff has said. To reach this point is just another indignity thrown onto the fetid pile of modern existence under capitalism. It's not going to be surprising when people start swinging.
Low-effort travel blog #3: Postcards from Bordeaux
Rank: 1
Mood: 🇫🇷 🏣
There were presenters from or based in Brazil, Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Poland, Chile, Costa Rica, Morocco, the UK, Australia, the United States, and France. Their work explored everything from the public management of urban space to the role of NGOs in the Global South, the embodied practices of skateboarding to skate media as an archival cultural practice. It is far too much, and too rich, to detail in a postcard.
Something to consider:
Spencer Ackerman
Good thing: Holly Anderson on Kaleb Horton.
Holly Anderson
Another good thing: Willy Staley went to Love Malmö and wrote a great piece about it for the New York Times.
Yes, another good thing:
That's right, another good thing:
José Vadi
You thought there wouldn't be another good thing?
Of course there's another good thing:
A good pod round-up:
Posted by
Templeton
An Embarcadero thing:
A book review thing: I wrote about Jacob Silverman's latest book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, for The Tyee.
A reading thing: If you're in the Vancouver area, I'll be doing a generally spooking reading on October 24.
Until next week… remember to do your stretches.
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.
