Rome street finals deliver shocks at World Skateboarding Tour opener

Japan left Colle Oppio with all three men’s medals, and Chloe Covell crushed the women’s final by 21.86 points as the World Skateboarding Tour’s Rome Street opener set the first major marker of the LA28 qualification period. Sora Shirai won the men’s title on 177.92, Kairi Netsuke took silver on 172.19 and Toa Sasaki claimed bronze on 168.41, while Kang Juni finished fourth, just 0.71 short of the podium.

The Rome Street stop ran June 17-21 at Colle Oppio Skatepark, an 837-metre public park on Oppian Hill overlooking the Colosseum, after the broader Rome program opened with Park at The Spot in Ostia from June 7-14. World Skate said 134 skateboarders from 59 countries entered the Street competition, but only eight men and eight women reached the final night, staged after sundown because of Rome’s daytime heat. The setting gave the opening phase of LA28 qualifying a major showcase feel, with the event free to spectators and carried live online and through terrestrial partners.

The men’s results were as sharp as they were surprising. Shirai, identified as the 2023 world champion and the world No. 1, controlled the final with an 86.47 run and a 91.45 trick, then held off late pushes from Netsuke and Sasaki, a two-time world champion. The deeper story was how many established names never got that far: Jagger Eaton, Cordano Russell, Felipe Gustavo, Vincent Milou, Shane O’Neill and Jhancarlos Gonzalez all fell well down the standings before the final, a sign that street skateboarding’s elite layer is becoming harder to predict.

Covell’s victory carried the same message in the women’s field, but with even more force. The Australian posted 177.01, built on an 86.84 run and a 90.17 best trick, and closed the night with a final-trick 93.34 that sealed the biggest winning margin on the World Skateboarding Tour. Yumeka Oda earned silver on 155.15 and Cui Chenxi took bronze on 152.78, while Rayssa Leal finished fifth after returning from the knee hyperextension that had interrupted her season earlier in the year. Japan’s women also arrived in Rome with serious depth, including Ibuki Matsumoto at No. 1, Nanami Onishi at No. 2 and Paris 2024 champion Coco Yoshizawa, which made every heat feel like an internal selection test as much as a title chase.

Covell’s Rome win followed her 2025 victory at the same Colle Oppio venue, and Skate Australia said she called this stop the first event of the year that counts toward LA28. For World Skate, the Rome opener was more than a medal table story: it showed how power is concentrating in a few national programs, how fragile the path is for once-safe finalists, and how the federation’s skateboard and roller-sports ecosystem is being built around visibility, rankings and Olympic pressure at the same time.