Ema Kawakami

Ema Kawakami: The Boy Who Beat Tony Hawk's Trick

At seven years old, Ema Kawakami rolled to the top of a skateboard vert ramp and spun a 900 — two and three-quarter mid-air rotations that had once been the most famous trick in the sport, a move Tony Hawk needed fourteen years and dozens of broken bones to land. Kawakami needed a fraction of that. By nine he had landed three in a row, in front of Hawk himself.

A Trick Ahead of a Childhood

Kawakami is a Japanese vert skateboarder born on September 8, 2014, who began spinning 900s — the trick popularized by Tony Hawk's landmark first-ever completion of one at the 1999 X Games — at age seven, according to X Games' official athlete profile. That made him, by a wide margin, the youngest skater ever to do it. He kept refining it rather than resting on it: on June 15, 2024, at age nine, he became the first skateboarder to land three consecutive 900s, a feat performed at Tony Hawk's own Vert Alert competition and witnessed by the trick's originator. He is also credited as the first skater to land an alley-oop 900 — a harder, reverse-rotation variant — in a best-trick contest setting.

Youngest Competitor, Then Youngest Medalist

Kawakami's rise through the X Games record book has been unusually fast even by the standards of a sport that now regularly fields pre-teen prodigies. He debuted at X Games Ventura in 2024 at nine years and nine months old, becoming the youngest male competitor in the history of the event. He broke his own mark roughly a year later: at X Games Salt Lake City in 2025, aged ten years and nine months, he medaled in Men's Skateboard Vert, making him the youngest male medalist X Games has recorded. He added a Vert Best Trick bronze at X Games Sacramento in 2026, becoming the youngest medalist in that discipline as well, and then a gold in Men's Skateboard Vert at X Games Chiba 2026. His competitive record, per X Games' own statistics, now stands at one gold and two bronze medals.

Beyond the Ramp

Kawakami's résumé outside major competition reinforces the same pattern of technical precocity: a Japan Skateboarding Federation vertical contest win and a Wingram Cup Vertical Series victory in 2023, and a Guinness World Record for landing the most backside 540 tricks in one minute — eight of them. In April 2024, GoPro added him to its roster of professional athletes, an unusually early sponsorship even by the compressed timelines of action-sports stardom. Public information about his life outside skateboarding — his hometown within Japan, his schooling, his family — is not documented in available sources, which is itself telling: at eleven, his public identity so far consists almost entirely of what he can do on a vert ramp.

Why Ema Is Called a Genius

Calling a child "a genius" for skateboarding stretches the word past its usual meaning, and it is worth being precise about what is actually being claimed. Nothing in the record suggests Kawakami possesses unusual intellectual gifts in the conventional sense — no claim about academic precocity, invention, or abstract reasoning appears anywhere in his coverage. What he has is an extraordinary, and extraordinarily early, mastery of a narrow physical and spatial skill: reading a vert ramp's geometry at speed, timing a rotation to the fraction of a second, and repeating that timing under competitive pressure at an age when most children are still learning to ride a bike without training wheels. Landing a 900 requires split-second proprioceptive judgment — knowing exactly where one's body is in three dimensions while inverted and spinning — refined through years of repetition and a tolerance for falling that most adults do not have, let alone children. Vert skateboarding commentators and X Games itself have repeatedly framed Kawakami's achievements in superlative, record-book terms — "youngest ever" attaches to nearly everything he has done — which functions as a public verdict that he is a prodigy of his craft, even if no formal authority has applied the word "genius" to him directly. The honest case against inflating that label further is that skateboarding prodigies, historically, are not guaranteed a long arc: injury, growth spurts that change a rider's center of gravity, and the sheer physical toll of vert skating have ended or stalled other precocious careers. What can be said without exaggeration is that Kawakami has compressed into roughly four years — from his first 900 at seven to an X Games gold at eleven — a technical trajectory that took the sport's most famous rider considerably longer to complete once, let alone repeat three times in a row.

Legacy in Progress

Kawakami's story is still being written in real time, one contest cycle at a time, and any assessment of his long-term place in skateboarding history is necessarily provisional. What is already secure is the record book: youngest to land a 900, youngest X Games competitor, youngest X Games medalist, and, as of 2026, an X Games gold medalist still several years from adolescence. Whether that translates into a lasting career at the sport's top level is a question only time — and a great many more vert ramps — can answer.