Skateboarding
Skateboarding
Yuto Horigome: How a quiet kid from Tokyo came to dominate skateboarding
Yuto Horigome is a skater with the world at his feet; a cabinet stuffed with every trophy going, video parts in the millions and a household name in his native Japan. This is his story, so far.
It's no exaggeration to say that Japan's Yuto Horigome is the pre-eminent force in worldwide skateboarding in 2025. The 26-year-old Tokyo native has achieved a clean sweep of accolades, including pulling off something close to a miracle of competitive skating. Japanese skate culture is booming worldwide right now and Horigome is the leader of that movement changing the skateboarding landscape forever.
Street skating was the second revolution in skateboarding, which took it out of the idyllic heartlands, into the consciousness and onto the road out front of the houses of bored young people. It was within this context that Yuto Horigome found himself somewhat born into skateboarding. Born in 1999 to a skateboarding father, Yuto was exposed to skate culture right from the very earliest stages of his life and became a regular fixture at Tokyo’s Murasaki Sports Skatepark.
01
Going to California
The stark reality of becoming a professional skateboarder in the sponsorship-funded world of video output and associated travel meant that the clearly preternaturally gifted Horigome, like countless other talented skateboarders from around the world, headed to the industry heartland of California aged 16.
Hitting the mattresses is a time-honoured skateboarding tradition dating back to the 1980s, if not earlier. Young and hungry amateur skateboarders find a way out to California to try and occupy floor space in a skate house somewhere, hoping to live off burritos and price-reduced grocery items as they try to create a name for themselves. The aim is to draw the attention of a team manager for a brand that can afford to pay some cash in return for endorsement or, failing that, product to sell onward in a kind of trickle-down economics of the lowest rung on the sponsorship ladder.
Very often in situations like this, young skateboarders need the help of established figures to open doors, maybe get them a spare seat in the van on a demo tour, so whichever team can make their own assessments.
Yuto Horigome, the man with the world at his feet
© Jason Halayko/Red Bull Content Pool
For Horigome, it was Canadian pro Micky Papa who got him a roster slot on the legacy brand Blind Skateboards, which was all the foothold he needed for his journey to start in earnest.
The entrance of mainstream sportswear brands into skateboarding's sponsorship mix at the turn of the millennium upset a kind of self-contained marketing economy, which had the effect, by Yuto’s coming of-age, of meaning that most professional skateboarders could no longer survive on sponsorship and video output alone. Being pro, for most skateboarders, needed to be supplemented by contest winnings once again, just as it had been back at the start.
02
2017: Yuto's contest domination begins
Yuto Horigome – Backside 360 Nosegrab
© Alexey Lapin
Horigome made his contest debut in 2014, but it wasn't until 2017 that he first found his feet on a podium and some fast prize money to pay rent and live a little. From that point on, however, he rapidly rose through the ranks: winning individual events such as Street League, X-Games and Tampa Pro over the coming years, as his stock within skateboarding rose in parallel to his undeniable, progressive skateboarding talent.
03
Life on video
Yuto Horigome - Frontside 5-0
© Nobuo Iseki/Red Bull Content Pool
As any skateboarder will tell you, being known - even primarily, much less exclusively - for skating contests is frowned upon by sponsors who wish to seem aligned with skateboarding's inner chambers of legitimacy. Video is the medium through which immortality is projected and so, in parallel to his contest dominance, Horigome has been sagely productive on the filming front as well, releasing video parts for wheel sponsor Spitfire (2021), April Skateboards (to whom he moved from the already-sinking Blind ship in 2019) and Nike SB, with viewerships running from one million to three million per release.
04
Joining the World Skateboarding Tour
By 2020, the greatest prize of them all hovered into view. Horigome became an Olympic gold medallist in his hometown of Tokyo during the postponed Games and cemented his status as the first among equals of the worldwide skate scene.
So dominant had he become in competitive skateboarding by this stage that it was widely assumed he would dominate the World Skateboarding Tour, which formed the qualification series for skateboarding all the way up to Paris 2024.
However, that turned out to be far from the case. As an Open format, the World Skateboarding Tour differs from private contest series in that the field is thrown open to competitors from all over the globe, rather than select invitees. As such, the standard of competition is both relentless and unbounded. In the three years of truncated Olympic cycle between Tokyo and Paris, Horigome found himself on the podium once - a comparatively subdued third place at the 2023 World Championship in Tokyo.
05
The miracle of Budapest
Yuto Horigome - Nollie 270 Bluntslide
© Kenji Haruta/World Skate
Horigome's spot on the Japanese team, much less Paris qualification, felt far from assured upon arrival at the penultimate qualifier in Budapest back in June 2024.
With the dream of an Olympic double all but dashed on the rocks of a very hungry Japanese contingent battling internally to make IOC national quota cuts, he pulled off his first Olympic miracle by winning outright on his last trick, a groundbreaking Backside 270 Nollie to Bluntslide on a handrail. Somehow, through magic or sheer will, Horigome had booked a spot in Paris and the possibility of retaining his title lay open, if small.
06
Redemption in Paris
Yuto Horigome going for gold
© Kenji Haruta/World Skate
Men's Street in Paris will be remembered as the wildest skateboard contest of all time. In a finals during which the lead changed almost by the minute, Horigome repeated the'Miracle Of Budapest' by once again surging from mid-pack to gold with his last trick - the same virtually-impossible manoeuvre that brought him victory and one which no other skateboarder in the world has as yet replicated.
In front of a television audience in the millions, he sealed his reputation as the world’s top skateboarder in the most emphatic fashion imaginable. The unthinkable had been made reality.
07
Rolling into the future
Yuto Horigome - Switch Bigspin Heelflip
© Nobuo Iseki/Red Bull Content Pool
Having by this point already collected every competitive accolade worth the name and a video audience in the millions for every release, the world is at Yuto Horigome’s feet right now. Where he goes from here is something not just the skateboarding world, but the entire nation of Japan will watch unfold - a pioneering talent the likes of which we have never seen before and may never again. That is the greatest measure of just how dominant Yuto Horigome is within skateboarding right now.
