Gone are the days when only Americans won almost all the medals at the X Games, this ESPN television show that has become an essential event in the world of so-called “extreme” sports. Just take a look at the results of the Tokyo Olympics in skateboarding to understand that the Japanese clan is settling firmly. Of four Olympic champions, three are Japanese: Yuto Horigome, Momiji Nishiya and Sakura Yosozumi. Less than a year later, they are back home for the first edition of the X Games in Chiba (this weekend), in the impressive 30,000-seat baseball stadium. In all disciplines (skateboard, BMX or motorcycle), the Japanese are now advancing as favourites.
Yuto Horigome, Olympic champion in street. (Alain Mounic/The Team)
Like Kokona Hiraki, the one who marked the 2019 edition, even before the Olympic spotlight. At 10 years and 341 days, the native of Kutchan, in the north of the country, on a board since she was 5 years old, had become the youngest medalist (silver) in the history of the X Games, yet known to put in before young riders. Two years later, in 2021, Hiraki even won silver at the Tokyo Olympics, brushing a new precocity record of 319 days (held by the Danish Inge Sörensen in bronze at 12 years and 24 days in 1936, in swimming ). Nicknamed the “nosegrind master” for her disconcerting ease in sliding on the modules, she is part of this very young generation driven by the arrival of skateboarding at the Olympic Games, totally upsetting the world of sport, but also of this Japanese tidal wave, whose level has exploded in recent years.
Kokona Hiraki, youngest medalist in X Games history. (Newscom/Alamy Stock Photo)
“They applied the Japanese work mentality to these action sports, they are hyper Stakhanovites”, explains Matthias Dandois, nine-time BMX flat world champion. At 32, the Frenchman is going to live his first X Games in a country he knows very well, and is no longer necessarily the big favorite on paper, ahead in particular of the Japanese Kio Hayakawa, 19, new darling of the middle. “Normally, in these disciplines, you start with your friends to have fun, he continues. And they took it directly as an ultra-high level sport, with a much higher workload than the Americans and Europeans. And that makes war machines. In BMX, the Japanese kids have managed to invent tricks that seem completely impossible to me. It’s like a different sport compared to just two years ago. But it’s cool, it pushes everyone too. »
