Wednesday, August 16

Vert-ical integration

By DJ Murphy
ESPN.com

SAN FRANCISCO -- On the day that ESPN announced a plan to take the X Games global by staging year-round events on five different continents, the in-line skating vert world was secure in the knowledge that it's already there.

More than any other event to be contested at this edition of the X Games, in-line vert boasts a truly international slate of competitors. The latest wave of skaters to top leaderboards at competitions around the world happens to be Japanese, but young skaters from Spain, Germany and the Netherlands are here in San Francisco as well and expect to be very competitive. In fact, only six of 24 skaters scheduled to compete this week are from the United States and, even though in-line skating was pioneered here, it won't be a surprise if the U.S. is not on the podium receiving X Games hardware when all is said and done.

The migration of sports from the U.S. overseas is not a new phenomenon, but rarely has one been so dominated by international competitors such a short time after its introduction. The main problem for U.S. skaters seems to be access to ramps. Veteran X Games competitor Taig Khris was born in Paris and lives in Greece. He thinks that it might be a matter of quality versus quantity.

"In America there are crazy skateparks, but not so many. In L.A. you have the Van's skate park, it's just incredible. I was in Woodward [Pa.] and it's incredible. But, there's not too many. In Europe the skateparks are not so good but there are much more."

The skaters here at the Games are elite and therefore have access to the facilities they need to train but because there are so few ramps for so many, the next generation of American skaters is tearing it up in the street, not on the ramp.

The next country to experience a drop-off in vert talent due to lack of facilities could be Australia. At the moment nothing could be farther from the truth as at least three of the favorites to medal are Aussie. Shane Yost, Cesar Mora and Matt Salerno form the backbone of a strong Australian contingent but Salerno sees that lean times ahead are possible for skaters from Down Under.

"We used to be one of those countries where you could just walk down the road and there was a vert ramp or there was a skatepark," said Salerno. "But our [government] ... took away all our vert ramps."

Salerno is bitter about the treatment of vert skaters in his country but seems intent on providing a solution. Along with Mora, Salerno might take on the burden of providing a ramp himself. "We just need one. The only time I really get quality skating is at shows and contests like this. So you can't just get up and skate when you feel like it, you have to skate when the day arrives. X Games is here, you gotta skate." A private ramp would solve this problem for Salerno and his friends but the best young talent in Australia might not have access to the facilities they need to improve and will go the way U.S. vert skaters seem to be going: Backwards.

An opportunity denied to American skaters might have been just the boost European and Japanese competitors needed. The restrictions placed on ramps in the U.S. and Australia are practically non-existent in the rest of the world. As a result, although the number of skaters in the U.S. dwarfs that of the rest of the world, those fewer international skaters have access to more ramps and more opportunity to hone the skills that have allowed them to leapfrog Americans, and develop a style of their own. Salerno points out that while the earlier wave of Australian skaters copied the American style, Europeans and Japanese have blazed a path of their own.

"What I admire about the Europeans and the Japanese is they're completely different. When I started skating we kind of learned off the Americans. That's why our styles are so similar. But the Japanese, I don't know where they learned how to skate. Mars or something. That must be why they're so good.

The names that will dominate the vert competition read like roll call at the U.N. The Yasutoko brothers Eito and Takeshi (Japan), Sven Boekhorst (The Netherlands), Yost, Salerno (Australia) and Khris (France) will battle for medals while young guns Tobias Bucher (Germany) and Nel Martin (Spain) are battling to break into the top six and represent the future of the sport. In the age of the global village and instant communication across borders, vert skaters lead the X Games toward the truly international competition it will become.