🇵🇭 Mazel Paris Alegado

Mazel Paris Alegado was born in 2013 or 2014 and grew up in Fontana, California, in a Filipino family. Her mother, Pauline Cristianne Constantino, had a conventional plan for her daughter — ballet and cheerleading — until a family visit derailed it. 'I was at my cousin's house and then I saw my brother on a skateboard and I was like, oh my gosh, that is so cool,' Alegado later recalled. 'And then I got on and I instantly fell in love.' She was five years old. Seeing her dedication, her mother backed the switch, and the skatepark replaced the dance studio.

Skating out of Southern California — one of the deepest talent pools in the sport — Alegado developed fast enough that the Philippine national program came calling while she was still in elementary school. She trains in the United States and has traveled as far as Portugal for competition preparation, balancing schoolwork with a contest calendar that spans two continents. In September 2023, at nine years old, she competed at the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, as the youngest member of the entire Philippine delegation. She was not there to make up the numbers: she qualified for the women's park final and finished seventh with a score of 52.85, competing against skaters nearly twice her age. By the following year, Vogue Philippines was profiling the girl it called the 'Skatepark Princess', chasing her dreams, as the magazine put it, with a smile.

Her results kept compounding. In January 2024 she won the Girl Park Open Advanced title at the California Amateur Skate League National Championship with 86 points, beating American competition in the final round. In June 2025 she advanced to the quarterfinals of the World Skateboarding Tour stop in Ostia, Italy, finishing 24th in the Women's Open standings — valuable exposure to the Olympic qualification circuit. In November 2025 she won the Skate Women's Bowl Open Pro Finals in Encinitas, California, a senior-level victory that set up the biggest month of her life.

At the 33rd Southeast Asian Games in Thailand in December 2025, Alegado entered the women's park event as one of the youngest athletes at the Games. In the final at Bangkok's SAT Extreme Sports Park she put down a run scoring 79.72 to win gold ahead of teammate Elizabeth Amador, also 11, with Thailand's Freya Sariya Brown taking bronze. At 11 years old, she broke the record as the youngest Filipino gold medalist in SEA Games history — a distinction previously associated with teenage swimmers and gymnasts, never a pre-teen skater at her first SEA Games.

'It feels crazy because this is my first SEA Games and I'm so proud to represent the Philippines,' she said afterward. 'It was so hype. Everyone was hyping me up.' The performance was part of a golden weekend for Philippine skateboarding — local headlines celebrated a double gold in the park events, as her coach at the Games, Jericho Francisco Jr., won the men's title himself. Between runs, the new champion did what any 11-year-old would: danced, made friends from other countries, and filmed TikToks. The federation suddenly had proof that its investment in a sport young Filipinos actually practice — in parking lots, plazas and park bowls — could out-produce traditional medal sources.

What makes Alegado's story resonate beyond the medal table is her self-awareness about it. 'Yeah, I love inspiring people, especially like little kids and little girls,' she said in Bangkok, hoping viewers of the livestream would pick up a board the way she once did after watching her brother. Skateboarding remains an unusual first sport for Filipino children, and the sight of two 11-year-old girls on the top steps of a SEA Games podium is precisely the kind of image that changes that.

Alegado now sits at the front of a generational wave in women's park skateboarding — the discipline of Sky Brown, Kokona Hiraki and Arisa Trew, where Olympic medalists are routinely 12 to 14 years old. Her trajectory, from Fontana's parks to Hangzhou at nine to SEA Games champion at eleven, tracks almost exactly one Olympic cycle ahead of the Los Angeles 2028 Games, which would be held minutes from where she trains. She has already made Philippine sports history once, at an age when most athletes have not yet entered their first national championship. The next records she breaks may not be regional.