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Skateboarding

This is Angelo Caro’s journey from Lima to the skateboarding big time

As Peru’s first top professional skateboarder, Angelo Caro is at the forefront of a South American contingent of athletes who are having a big impact on the sport right now.
Written by Niall Neeson
5 min readPublished on
Angelo Caro is the first professional skateboarder ever to come out of Peru. This has been helped by the fact that changes to the sponsorship landscape in recent years have meant anybody with enough skill and hunger can make a name for themselves.
Just look at the Japanese domination of women’s competitive skateboarding from an almost standing start within the last decade. Similarly, the South American invasion has not only continued in volume and but also in geographic spread. Caro is at the spearhead of that movement.
Angelo Caro performs a frontside nosegrind at Red Bull Performance Camp in Vista, California, on 11 November, 2023.

Angelo Caro is a rising star of skateboarding

© Anthony Acosta/Red Bull Content Pool

The 24-year-old has a Lima skatepark named in his honour after becoming a Tokyo Olympian, but it wasn’t quite the same when he started out skateboarding aged ten on the heels of his older brother, Fabrizio.
A self-described "restless child", Caro had only been skateboarding for two years when he discovered the South American predilection for skateboard contests. “I gave my mum loads of headaches," he says, "because I used to run away with my older brother to go to the competitions.”
Angelo Caro performs a frontside blunt at Red Bull Performance Camp in Vista, California on 11 November, 2023.

All action

© Anthony Acosta/Red Bull Content Pool

When you go for it, if you do it with your heart then things happen
A small win at one such contest at age 12 proved to be a revelation for Caro as he realised he could help the family out via prize money. This is something the Americans who dominated skateboarding culture up until the early 2000s failed to grasp about the hunger of their new competitors within the attention economy: these newcomers weren’t playing games or acting deferentially to their better-known peers.
As Caro recalls: “In my childhood, I had to take on the responsibilities of adults, like paying for a house when I was 13 or 14 years old.”
01

International debut

Angelo Caro switch tailslides into second place at Skate Arcade 2015.

Angelo Caro scored second place at Skate Arcade in Lisbon in 2015

© Vasco Neves

Caro was 15 when he made his first skateboarding foray out of South America to take part in 2015’s Red Bull Skate Arcade in Lisbon, Portugal. The downtown contest, which saw 16 finalists whittled down from more than 10,000 video entrants worldwide, featured skateboarders from Spain, Slovenia, the USA, Venezuela, Austria, Brazil, El Salvador, Ecuador, Estonia, Colombia, Panama, Portugal, Argentina, Costa Rica and Mexico alongside Caro representing Peru.
He finished in second place in that competition – a remarkable result for his international debut.
“When you know other countries, you have more opportunities, you learn, you meet new cultures, languages, another type of relationships," he says. "In Europe and USA there are sponsorships, things that help me a lot in my career and my personal life.”
After scoring third place at the pivotal Tampa Am contest in 2018 he won Prague’s Mystic Cup in 2019 before taking an incredible fifth place in Tokyo, where skateboarding made its debut at the Games. This, bear in mind, is a little over a decade after he first picked up a skateboard.
Angelo Caro performs during the Red Bull Steep Street in Prague, Czech Republic on July 22, 2023.

Caro performs during Red Bull Steep Street in Prague

© Lukáš Wagneter/Red Bull Content Pool

I gave my mum loads of headaches because I used to run away with my older brother to go to the competitions
02

Skate tours

As every skateboarder will tell you, video is where immortality beckons. The skate tour video is an art form in itself, fusing cutting-edge footage with adventure tourism and destination marketing.
Angelo Caro does an ollie during Red Bull Mind the Gap in Des Moines, Iowa, on 24 September, 2022

Caro is known for blowing minds with his incredible tricks

© Alex Sveda/Red Bull Content Pool

Nobody in the past 10 years has come close to Red Bull’s skate tours, and Caro quickly established himself as a footage machine on many of our most memorable tours in Colombia, China and Paraguay – blowing the minds of viewers all over the world in the process.
Of his unbelievable skating output on those tours, he explains: "When you go for it, if you do it with your heart then things happen. Coming from Peru, we are fighters, we are very strong, we get up and we try again. This is the message I want to put through in every competition, in every video, in each moment I can communicate something to people."
03

Breaking new ground

2 min

The white desert

Creating a skatepark out of bricks of pure salt in the Andes mountain range has never been done, until now.

English

In the same year as he made the podium at Tampa Am, Caro also starred alongside Jaakko Ojanen and Vladik Scholz in a project to cut and ride a skatepark made entirely out of solid salt in the otherworldly high-altitude saline flats of Bolivia’s Salar De Uyuni, which was viewed by millions.
04

Stepping it up

8 min

Larvikite lines

Torey Pudwill and friends create, shred and then donate ancient stone skate spots in Norway.

English +3

Our 2020 project collaborating with Lundhs Real Stone to cut and donate a skatepark made from solid stone to the local skate scene in Larvik, Norway, remains one of our most famous and groundbreaking skate projects of all time. Caro’s Tailslide into the quarry face remains one of the gnarliest, most unrepeatable skateboarding tricks ever committed to film – and that single trick alone from the project was viewed more than a quarter-of-a-million times when it dropped.
There's always room to learn and grow, however, and Caro is not one to stand still.
"I want to add things to my skateboarding," he says. "In each part of the world we have a different style, for example in Latin America we are warriors, we fall over and we get up, without thinking about things much! In Europe they are more technical, they do tricks. I want to learn from them."
05

Rising through the rankings

Angelo Caro at Red Bull Steep Street in Prague, Czech Republic, on July 22, 2023.

Angelo is a big draw at contests

© Jakub Zeman/Red Bull Content Pool

Currently 25th in Men’s Street on the Official World Skate Rankings, Caro is heading into the decisive WST Tokyo Street World Championships in 2023 as the World Skateboarding Tour hurtles towards its conclusion in Paris. Teeing him up for that event is a strong second place in Chile’s Pan-American Games which featured skateboarders competing from 11 skate-mad nations throughout The Americas, which has boosted his profile there no end.
"Before, children would come to ask to take their picture with me – now the parents come, too," he says. "That’s when I realised that what I wanted to achieve, I’m doing: I wanted to bring skateboarding to more people."
With just a little luck on his side, 2024 could be the year his dreams reach fruition on the biggest stage. Improving on his fifth place in Tokyo would be a fairy-tale fitting for the humble kid from Lima who started supporting his family from the age of just 14 – and skateboarding is fuelled by the power of such stories.
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Part of this story

Angelo Caro

Having competed at the sport’s biggest events, Peruvian skateboarder Angelo Caro is one of the most exciting talents coming out of the Latin American scene right now.

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