Turns out it's banging
Seven years in Detroit with Palace, Chloe Covell dominates, Juni Kang wows at MoonPay X Games League Monster Energy Men's Skateboard Street Best Trick, Alec Majerus continues, 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.
Turns out it's banging
Rank: 1
Mood: 🚗🌆
In 2019, when asked by Free Skate Mag why the Palace Skateboards team chooses to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to places like Detroit, Michigan, where the team had already been twice in the last year, longtime Palace professional Danny Brady jokingly responded, "Basically, we pick places where Lev [Tanju] wants to go and eat." When Tanju was asked the same question roughly seven years later by Thrasher Magazine while promoting Palace's latest full-length video Detroit 313, he answered, in part, "The food's amazing."
Detroit 313, filmed in the city between August 2018 and November 2025, is Palace's strongest showing in years. You could call it a return to form following last year's More Highly Defined, the brand's venture into full Hi-Definition territory, which was a quality video, but didn't ring true like the Hi8 Palace offerings of old.
Beyond the aesthetic trappings, there is a subtle storytelling running throughout Detroit 313 that elevates the viewing experience further, as Tanju told Thrasher, "[The team] only spent about a couple of months there in total, but every year they would go out once, if not twice... It's like a kind of portrait of them growing up. They're really young in some shots, really old in other shots. I love it because it shows part of these guys' lives just chilling and hanging out and becoming better friends throughout the video."
There is a Linklaterish, Seven-Up! element to the project, which also extends to the environs around them. You can see different DIY spots spring up and expand over the course of their visits, as countless spots are fixed up and rendered skateable thanks to the Herculean efforts of Detroiters like Justin Bohl, all the while the city, worn as it is, pulses with life.
"I love how [Detroit] looks on the Betamax cameras. How messed up it looks, how dystopian, and then beautiful at the same time. All these amazing American cars pulling up to spots," says Tanju. The locals pulling up is a highlight of the video. The extended scene of Charlie Birch battling a frontside-feeble down a handrail in a housing complex as a group of neighbours swells to both cheer him on and party (and offer Birch shots of liquor between failed attempts) is as hilarious as it is heartwarming.
Detroit 313 succeeds where any professional-grade skate video should: with great skateboarding. Rory Milanes, Lucien Clarke, Kyle Wilson, Pedro Attenbordough, Jahmir Brown, Ville Wester, Shawn Powers, Brady, Birch, and Heitor Da Silva all deliver. The video also succeeds in making Detroit look, to quote Tanju, "amazing."
"[Detroit's] amazing to skate, amazing to party — the food's amazing. It's like a bit lawless, innit? You know what? It's one of my favourite places I've been to in America, for sure. Amazing hospitality. Amazing spots. DIYs everywhere. So I'm personally really heavily inspired," Tanju told Thrasher.
The city's influence on Palace's founder runs even deeper. "I listen to a lot of music from Detroit, getting into techno when I was younger. With all the new music that was coming out of Detroit and the history of the city, to me, it was an iconic place to make a video."
Or, to put it more directly, as Brady told Free in 2019, "Rory [Milanes said] ‘let’s go to Detroit,’ so we did, and it turns out it’s banging."
Arrivals and evolutions
Rank: 1
Mood: 🐨🥇
It's not right, exactly, to say that Chloe Covell has just now "arrived." The 16-year-old from Australia has been on a tear since she first started making her presence known on the competitive circuit at 12. A little over two years ago, I sang her praises as a force on the course and in the streets.
However, if you watched Covell compete at the World Skate Rome Street Women's Finals two weekends back, you saw all of those flashes of brilliance coalesce into something blinding. Dominating. By the time the contest was over, Covell was over 20 points ahead of the rest of the field, which included heavy hitters and Olympic Champions like Rayssa Leal, Yumeka Oda, and Coco Yoshizawa.
Covell's efforts in the run section were flawless, powerful, and increasingly technical. In Best Trick, where skaters are given three attempts to get a single high score, a quirk of Olympic events, she landed a frontside-bluntslide-bigspin-out on the biggest rail on the course, first try. Two tries later, on the same rail, she was riding away from a perfectly executed nosegrind-nollie-kickflipped-out.
On commentary, Ryan Decenzo said several times that Covell was doing tricks that would compete with those done in the Men's division. That could be taken as a backhanded compliment, but he's absolutely right. A common refrain in this newsletter is that the Women's divisions are the most exciting in competitive skateboarding because that rapid advancement in skill and ability can be traced event by event. Covell is the prime example of that. And as she gets better, so does the rest of the field, with the dominant Covell only snagging second at the inaugural MoonPay X Games League event in Sacramento last weekend.
Speaking of...
MoonPay X Games League Sacramento 2026 Monster Energy Men's Skateboard Street
Rank: 540
Mood: 😕?
If you happened to watch MoonPay X Games League Sacramento 2026 Monster Energy Men's Skateboard Street on Saturday, then you likely saw, somewhere between the wash of logos for corporate behemoths like Amazon, Google Cloud, the U.S. Army, along with four different alcoholic beverages, and ad spots for sketchy cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets like MoonPay, MetaMask, and the extremely sketchy crypto casino Stake, some incredible skateboarding.
While Ginwoo Onodera, who recently traded in his Nikes for adidas, came from behind to win the event, South Korea's Juni Kang likely made the biggest impression. Kang often draws comparisons to Yuto Horigome, and for good reason. He has all the speed, power, and tricks of the multiple-time Olympic Champion — including the nollie-backside-360-to-slide variations Horigome once cornered the market on.
Kang netted bronze in Monster Energy Men's Skateboard Street and then gold in Monster Energy Men's Skateboard Street Best Trick the following day by taking a Horigome-inspired maneuver and adding his own extra spin on it.
Much like the rapid advancement of the Women's divisions, seeing the technical level that skateboarding has reached and then just as quickly outpace in these high-pressure environments is hard to put into words. Well, you can find some, especially when describing how Kang's 270-degree spin out of the boardslide he nollie-270-heelflipped into to complete the 540(!) was almost entirely spent sliding on the ground. Sometimes progression is messy like that.
In the greater context of MoonPay X Games League Monster Energy Men's Skateboard Street Best Trick, is all of this extreme and extremely off-putting corporatization, foregrounded by predatory companies like Stake, also just the messy part of progress? Can competitive skateboarding not just survive, but advance, without aligning itself with Monsters? A friend who attended the event said the on-the-ground experience was "odd but cool but odd."
The broadcast experience was about the same. The online replay of the event uploaded by X Games is full of technical issues, from timers not showing up during competitors' first runs, multiple instances of dead commentary mics during long stretches of the action, to play-by-play announcer Brandon Graham getting caught on a hot mic saying, "This has been a weird contest, man." It's unclear what he meant by that — it could have been the skaters' performances or the general vibe — but as far as the debut of the MoonPay X Games League goes, that was my takeaway, too.
A question no one is asking
Rank: 1
Mood: 🙋
Why? Why is Alec Majerus not a bigger name in skateboarding? For over a decade, he has been one of the most skillful and technically progressive skateboarders on the scene, in regard to high-level stair and handrail skating, at least. During adidas' Thrasher Weekend trip to Montreal, published a couple of weeks back, Majerus, among a cast of some of the best skateboarders on the planet, himself included, closes out the edit.
Every time I see him on screen, I'm hit with that same thought, like in late 2023, when I wondered at excruciating length if it was simply a lack of sartorial eye.
That’s a selfish thought, I know. Perhaps even a mean one, especially if I share that I think he dresses like a mannequin at Zumiez. But, to be fair, he always has. It’s not like he’s tried to adopt an unnatural look or persona or anything; he’s simply a regular person who is exceptionally good at skateboarding and is wearing what is comfortable for him. There’s nothing wrong with that, and it might even be “cool” for others; it just does nothing for me. In some cases, it actively makes me not enjoy the skateboarding on screen. Which is kind of fucked up.
Why does someone’s fashion sense, or perceived lack of it, have any bearing on them being a watchable skateboarder? I’d say it’s because for all of the things skateboarding is and what we try to define it as — art, sport, Xtreme Sport, pastime, etc. — skateboarding is, at its core, a physical activity deeply concerned with aesthetics. Always has been. Whether it’s the visual mechanics of a trick, the scenic potential of a skate spot, or the clothes a skateboarder wears while doing a trick at a scenic spot — aesthetics is skateboarding.
Is that always a healthy thing? Probably not. However, it’s also what allows a person to take a skateboard and make it their own, from what tricks they do to how they look while doing them. All this to say, just loosen up the pants a little bit, Alec. Or slim down the tops. You could even have them meet somewhere in the middle. This sail and mast thing you’ve got going on is very 2012.
Things have tightened up since then, but perhaps not enough. Or maybe he suffers from Toogooditis, a not-uncommon condition in which a skateboarder is just too good and operates at such a high, unrelatable level that it's desensitizing. And if you are just plain good and don't stand out for any other marketable reason, whether style, spot selection, or personality, that's how someone like Majerus ends up on Arbor Skateboards, a company without much in the way of cultural capital, but the good sense to spend its capital on Majerus as it looks to build up the former.
Is that right or good? Maybe not in a meritocratic industry, but this is not that. Skateboarding is a business based on the sale of hard and soft goods. I'm just glad he's getting a paycheque.
Update... ?
Rank: 5
Mood: ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄
On Saturday, the day after this newsletter reported on the latest goings-on in the world of turnaround businessman Marc Roca and his flagging ventures in Lakai Footwear and Tactics Skate and Snowboard shop, I was sent a link to an Instagram post that appeared to be a front-facing camera video shot in the front seat of a car featuring Roca explaining what happened with Lakai. I was at an engagement party when I received the link and had had a few complimentary beverages, so I didn't save the video (shoutout to love!), but I did take a couple of screenshots because of how absurd it was.
The video, posted by an account with the handle "Marc Roca - Failed Skateboarding CEO" with (now) six followers, was taken down the next day and may have possibly been AI-generated. From my Peroni-tinged recollection, the maybe-not-real Roca is effusive in his praise of Luis Mora and his partner Ivan Moreno, a Spanish businessman and founder of Nomad Skateboards, who had been working with the pair behind the scenes. Roca-of-uncertain-provenance effectively takes the blame for the company's decline, saying he got overexcited, ordered too much stock, and Lakai simply ran out of money.
If real, and that's a big if, it was an exceptionally strange thing for Roca to do, publishing a mea culpa to effectively no one. If it's fake, it's perhaps even stranger, considering that one of the followers of the account, whose handle has since been changed to @marcskateceo with a bio that reads "I used to skate", is Ivan Moreno.
Make of this as you will. Or don't think about it all. It's quite stupid, really.
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Something to consider: Skateboarding and Urban Cultural Ecologies (SAUCE), a new "DIY journal dedicated to the cultural, social, aesthetic, and athletic contributions of skateboarding," is now open for submissions.
The editors are Brian Glenney, Thom Callan-Riley, Bethany Geckle, Thomas Kemp, and Betsy Gordon, along with an all-star editorial board that includes Dani Abulhawa, Kyle Beachy, Iain Borden, Kristin Ebeling, Gustav Eden, Sander Hölsgens, Ocean Howell, Patrick Kigongo, Paul O’Connor, Natalie Porter, Adelina Ong, Cengiz Salman, Indigo Willing, and, for some reason, me.
Check it out, get saucey.
Good thing: Anthony Pappalardo is taking pre-orders for a new batch of shirts with proceeds going toward the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico.
Anthony Pappalardo
Another good thing:
Walker Ryan
That's right, another good thing:
Ramsey Khalifeh
A farewell thing:
Katie Heindl
A watching your steps thing:
Jesse Winter and Andrea Woo and Photography by Jesse Winter
Good things on the Jackasses in our lives:
Luke O’Neil
Lindsey Adler
A grate finals thing:
TOL on China Banks:
'sletter friend Olivier Jutel on AI doomerism as marketing and "Line Go Up Teleology":
ACMe Smokescreen
Until next week… try a boardslide that scares you.
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.
