By The decision is arbitrary. There’s voting, but much like in our country, it doesn’t actually matter who gets the most votes. The decision comes down to a one-person Electoral College, and that single Elector is a ghost.
Thrasher’s Skater of the Year stands out as the subculture’s premier popularity contest, and it serves as an officially unofficial counter to the more quantifiable contests in that world: historically, the X Games and, more recently, the Olympics.
Each year, pro skateboarders strategically release their best and biggest parts toward the end of the year so they are at the top of the pile when it comes to creating the shortlist for Skater of the Year. In the internet age, “part” is sort of a misnomer, since they’re not always part of a larger piece of work released by a company the same way a band releases an album. It’s immediate, which makes it even simpler for skaters to release things the second it’s most advantageous.
From there, the skateboarding world votes, but ultimately, it comes down to one person. In the past, it was Thrasher editor in chief Jake Phelps, whose role at the company was less signing off on pages and proofreading and more serving as the figurehead arbiter of the core of skateboarding. If the voters wanted one guy, Phelps could still veto. Over the years you could tell, if you’re clued into this space, what kind of part Phelps would pick. He valued speed, heights, hard slams—a punk rock approach to skateboarding, taking it to the streets with no regard for personal safety or collateral damage. Hammers, in skate parlance.
Jake Phelps died in 2019, but the Phelps ethos behind Skater of the Year very much lived on. You could still tell which part and, by extension, which skater, would get the award based on whether it felt like something Phelps would dig. There’s a reason Nyjah Huston, whose execution was beyond perfect and whose paychecks through endorsements and contest purses outweighed most of the other industry combined, never won despite clearly twerking for the award with the late November release of parts like 2022’s “Need That,” ostensibly put out by Nike.
Ultimately, Nyjah (and the rest of the crowd) were pipped by New York’s Tyshawn Jones, who lit the skating world on fire and even allowed it to break containment into mainstream journalism with a kickflip over a New York subway track.
This is where the heart of a lot of SOTY discussion lies, and part of what makes the arbitrary designation so frustrating depending on whether your guy won or not: Singular moment versus body of work? Narrative versus vacuum? Is it about the part itself or one trick? Is it about everything that came before it for this person and their orbit, or does it only matter what came out in Q4?
We’re back there again, with another SOTY being named, the usual online corners lighting up in argument, and no one coming to a simple agreement. It feels like skateboarding is perhaps more fractured than it’s ever been—which means it’s finally catching up to the rest of the world.
2025’s Thrasher Skater of the Year came from a singular event and also the narrative behind it. Chris Joslin, known in the skating world for his nearly unparalleled ability to throw himself down and over huge pieces of real estate, did a 360 flip over the famous El Toro stairset as the ender on his “G-Ma” part. It’s a huge stair set, and the tre flip was a White Whale for Joslin and skateboarding at large, to the point where others in skating, like former Girl Skateboards pro Mikemo Capaldi, called it the “Street 900,” referencing the paradigm-shift event of Tony Hawk’s 900 on vert, which, famously, was in a contest broadcast by ESPN, which meant something in 1999.
The tre flip was huge. No doubt. No one can argue that. It was big enough that people online started asking whether it was AI, or whether the impact was great enough that Joslin dragged his heel on the ground, thus nullifying it. Calling it the “Street 900” seems wrong, though.
Ultimately, Joslin’s trick itself doesn’t change anything—at least not if you look at it purely in the sense that the actual 900 did.
I don’t have to explain Tony Hawk’s prevalence. You don’t have to know the first thing about skateboarding to remember that that one trick set in motion a total societal shift thanks to video games, movies, commercials, etc. You know who Tony Hawk is and what he’s done. For what it’s worth, he was the first Skater of the Year, because Phelps was a vert skater.
Vert skateboarding has fallen severely out of fashion since Hawk’s 900 and the following years. The skating world has gone in waves over time. It was ramps, then it was street and vert, then it was pretty firmly just street for a long time. Even in the era where video parts were on DVD, or even VHS, it was a joke in skateboarding that the fast-forward button was the “vert button.”
Vert tried its best to stay relevant, building bigger ramps to go even higher and faster, yet it seemed like it was digging itself into sideshow territory even with singularly great moments like Danny Way’s jump over the Great Wall of China, or Bob Burnquist’s genre-defining “Dreamland” part in his backyard ramp.
But the kids loved the streets. Mostly because everyone has a street, but not everyone has a perfectly constructed 13-foot vert ramp at their disposal. Even the pros don’t have access to as many in the mecca of Southern California, as was laid out in a recent Rolling Stone profile of vert phenom Jimmy Wilkins.
The Wilkins piece touched on the new crop of young vert skaters who are pushing the medium to literal new heights. This crop includes Tom Schaar, who is employed by Tony Hawk’s Birdhouse skateboards and has competed in the Olympics as well as filmed parts in backyard ramps and DIY parks alike. This fall, Schaar emerged on the cover of Thrasher with an enormous disaster (spinning 180 degrees and hanging your back trucks over the ledge of a ramp) on the dizzyingly enormous vert wall at Philly’s FDR skatepark. I’ve seen that wall. It’s huge. It played at the beginning of his full-length part, set to the tune of the Cranberries’ “Zombie,” as if he were reminding us that he is reviving something once thought dead. (Worth noting that Schaar has also put out a part called “Vert’s Not Dead.”)
Throughout the part, named “Curtains,” Schaar redefines what we understand about ramp skating, bringing street influence and tech to speeds and heights that require special trucks to keep the board steady. His part is a love letter that touches on the great moments of vert skating before him, including featuring his new boss for a minute, filming at Bob Burnquist’s now-rundown Dreamland park (and including clips of the man himself). Like a band sampling lyrics from an obvious influence, Schaar does things like stall on a soccer net placed above teammate Elliot Sloan’s backyard ramp, just as Burnquist had done at his own house, and select tricks that those of us who have been along for the ride instantly recognize as knowing callbacks to everything that came before it.
While Joslin’s part will be remembered for one trick, Schaar’s was full to the brim with equal parts innovation and reverence for the past.
If you knew, you saw that he was pushing this into a new direction. And yet, Joslin tre flipped El Toro, so he won.
Singular moment versus body of work.
There are plenty of arguments to be made on every side, including the sides of other contenders like TJ Rogers or Antonio Durao. Rogers, too, joins the conversation about narrative versus vacuum as someone who survived cancer and returned to pro skateboarding. The internet of skateboarding is absolutely alight with memes, jokes, arguments and opinions about who should’ve won and why. Just like the rules of the game, though, there are no clear indicators on who gets SOTY.
But, the very fact that Schaar, an unabashed contest skater, because in 2025 you simply must be a contest skater to make a living as a vert skateboarder, was in the running at all for what was core skateboarding’s biggest honor, is a tide shift. That, to me, is more of a singular BC/AD moment than the “Street 900,” on par with the original 900. After all, that was done on vert, too.
It doesn’t mean that suddenly the Olympics will gain credibility in the greater Thrasher ecosystem. But it does blur the line quite a bit, when the first round of Olympic skateboarding featured a lot of guys that could diplomatically be called “irrelevant” to most modern skateboarding discussions. Not all, but some. When was the last time you saw a Jagger Eaton part?
From the vert skateboarding perspective, too, if the goal is greater credibility, having the likes of Schaar now a part of the conversation brings even more spotlight to vert skateboarding, which Tony Hawk himself has been pushing to get included in the Olympics. It does seem odd that the discipline designed around manufactured equipment is missing from the event, doesn’t it?
But this isn’t even about whether vert or street or Schaar or Joslin deserved the award. What this SOTY campaign and all of the politics and infighting showed was that there are even more factions of skateboarding than there might have been last year. There is no unanimous favorite. There was no shoe-in. And skateboarding suddenly isn’t a two-party system dominated by one side of the aisle. (And, for what it’s worth, the amount of jokes about Joslin’s vaccine status show that the actual politics in skateboarding have plenty of polarity, too.)
What Joslin did in one trick earned him the award. You can’t argue because you can’t point to the rulebook or the rubric. But what Schaar did pushed the culture and shined a light on the fact that maybe it’s not so clear what skateboarding as a singular, monolithic thing is anymore, and it’s only going to get murkier as more guys like him pop up.
Again, it depends on whether you look at things in a vacuum or in context. Maybe the singular act of Joslin’s 360 flip did do enough: It broke the whole thing wide open in its divisiveness.
Comments