🇪🇸 Egoitz Bijueska

Park skateboarding is judged on a single continuous run through a bowl, which rewards line construction over any one trick. Bijueska's winning run in Chiba was built on an Indy 360 over the box jump, a tailgrab 540 through the quarterpipe channel and a switch 180 lien grab back over the box — a sequence that puts a switch-stance trick, the least natural option available, at the end of the run rather than the start, where a skater is freshest. He also entered the vert competition at the same event and finished seventh, an unusual double at that age.

The result was not an ambush. Bijueska arrived in Japan as a reigning world champion: he won the park title at the 2025 World Skateboarding Championship, contested in March 2026 in São Paulo, with 95.83 in the final. He had also qualified first for the men's final at the World Skate Park World Cup in Rome in June 2025 with 94.50 and gone on to win it, taken third at Tony Hawk's Vert Alert in 2025, and podiumed at the Vert Battle in Curitiba. In 2026 he took bronze at the World Skate Tour stop in Ostia, an event he had won the year before.

His progression has one visible setback in it, which is worth stating because it frames the rest. He did not qualify for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games through the Olympic Qualifier Series. He was thirteen at the time, competing against a field that included the eventual Olympic medallists, and he has spent the two seasons since moving from the edge of qualification to beating the Olympic champion in a head-to-head final.

Basque skateboarding has a strong grassroots culture and thin competitive infrastructure at the elite level, and Spain has historically produced its international skateboarding results in street rather than park. Bijueska is the first Spaniard to convert that base into a marquee park title. The Chiba result also completes an unusual sequence within a fortnight — silver on X Games debut in Sacramento, gold at the next stop in Chiba — which tends to indicate a rider adapting to a new format rather than one having a single good day.

One factual caution belongs in the record. The score reported for his winning run differs across outlets: Spanish television reported 92.16, with Schaar on 91.33 and Palmer on 91.00, while the event's sponsor release gave 92.66. Since 92.66 is also the figure published for Gui Khury's vert run at the same event, at least one of the two is a transcription error, and the honest description is that he scored just over 92 points.