🇯🇵 Ema Kawakami

Vert skateboarding is the discipline where the physics are least forgiving to a small rider. The ramp is roughly four metres of transition and the tricks that score are rotations completed above the coping, which means the skater has to generate enough vertical air to have time to spin. Adult vert skaters do this with body mass and leg strength that an eleven-year-old simply does not have; the compensation has to come from line selection, pumping efficiency and rotational technique. Kawakami's competitive record suggests he solved that problem years before his body caught up with the event.

The milestones arrived in strict order. At X Games Ventura in 2024, aged nine years and nine months, he became the youngest male competitor the event had ever accepted. At X Games Salt Lake City in 2025, aged ten years and nine months, he took bronze in skateboard vert and became the youngest male medallist. At Chiba in 2026, aged eleven years and nine months, he took the gold. Three appearances, three records, each set almost exactly a year apart.

The trick history runs parallel to it. He landed a 900 — two and a half aerial rotations — in August 2022, when he was seven, which made him the youngest person ever to complete one. On 15 June 2024, at Tony Hawk's Vert Alert, he landed three consecutive 900s, something nobody had done before, with Hawk himself commentating. He was also the first to land an alley-oop 900 in competition, and he holds a Guinness World Record for the most backside 540s completed in one minute, with eight.

The Chiba result was not a one-off within the weekend either. At the same event he finished fourth in vert best trick, having taken bronze in that discipline at X Games Sacramento earlier in the 2026 season. The rider he beat, Gui Khury, is himself a former child record-breaker — Khury landed the first 1080 on a vert ramp at twelve — which gives the result a certain symmetry: the sport's previous youngest phenomenon was displaced by the next one, in a discipline where careers are usually measured in decades rather than years.

Two honest qualifications belong on the record. The X Games is an invitational commercial event, not a world championship sanctioned by a federation, so the title is a marquee prize rather than a global ranking. And the youngest-gold-medallist claim is X Games' own, drawn from its internal archive rather than an independent register. What is not in question is the competition itself: the podium at Chiba was Khury and Shibata, both established international vert skaters, and the scores were separated by a little over a point.