X Games Skateboarding History: 30 Years of Records and Legends

ESPN invented the Extreme Games in the summer of 1995, spread across Newport, Providence and Mount Snow. The idea sounded weird even to skaters themselves: a traditional sports channel putting together a contest for sports TV had never taken seriously. Tony Hawk took gold in vert and Chris Senn won street, with Hawk in second.

It worked well enough that the following year ESPN shortened the name to X Games and turned it into an annual event. Without that experiment it's hard to imagine Olympic skate today: it was the first time a mainstream audience watched skating in prime time.

The Vert Doubles format (two skaters on the ramp at the same time, choreographing crossing lines) debuted in 1997. Tony Hawk and Andy Macdonald won it six years straight, from 1997 to 2002. Of Hawk's ten X Games golds, six came in doubles with Macdonald.

Macdonald would go on to accumulate 23 medals across vert disciplines. And to top it all off, decades later he competed at the Paris 2024 Olympics at age 51 representing Great Britain, the oldest Olympic skater in history.

June 27, 1999, Best Trick at X Games V in San Francisco. Competition time had already run out when Tony Hawk decided he wasn't leaving without the 900 — two and a half rotations nobody had ever landed. The announcer dropped the line that went down in history: we're making up the rules as we go, let him try again. After about ten slams, he put it down.

Three months later, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater hit shelves. The deal with Activision had been signed before the 900 (January 1999), but both things landing in the same summer turned Hawk into the most famous skater on the planet — probably forever. In 2016, at 48 years old and exactly 17 years later, he landed another one and filmed it for his channel.

X Games 2001. Bucky Lasek, two-time defending champion, looked like he had the vert gold locked up. In the final round, Bob Burnquist needed more than a 95.5 and unleashed a switch run nobody had ever seen in competition: 98 points and gold. A lot of people still consider it the best vert run in X Games history.

The interesting part is that it wasn't one single trick — it was a style statement: Burnquist skating switch as naturally as regular, something that in 2001 sounded like science fiction.

For the first seven editions there were no women's skate events. Jen O'Brien and Cara-Beth Burnside pushed ESPN until they got a demo in 2002 and, finally, full competition in 2003. Vanessa Torres won the first women's street gold and Burnside took the vert.

Half the battle was still ahead: in 2005 the men's vert winner took home $50,000 and the women's winner $2,000. Burnside and Mimi Knoop organized the riders through the Action Sports Alliance and fought back until ESPN announced equal prize money at the end of 2008, effective from 2009.

Danny Way had been building ramps since 2002 that didn't fit in any skatepark: a multi-story roll-in, a gap as wide as a street, and a massive quarter. In 2004 the X Games made room for his creation with the Big Air event at Staples Center, and Way took three consecutive golds (2004, 2005, and 2006).

In between, in 2005, he jumped the Great Wall of China on a busted ankle after a slam during practice. It wasn't an X Games, but it's the clearest picture of what the Mega Ramp meant: skateboarding operating at a scale that previously only existed in video games.

2007 Big Air final. Jake Brown lands a 720 over the gap, loses the board at the top of the quarter and falls roughly 14 meters flat. His shoes flew off on impact, and the entire arena went silent until, about five minutes later, Brown got up and walked out with help, the whole stadium on its feet.

The "walked out" part comes with a catch: ruptured spleen, fractured vertebrae, bruised liver and lung, and three months off the board. The good part of the story came in 2009, when he returned to that same contest and took gold.

Burnquist competed in every Summer X Games from the first one in 1995 all the way through his retirement at Minneapolis 2017. Nobody else can say that. Along the way he stacked 30 medals — the all-time Summer X Games record according to Guinness — including five consecutive Big Air golds.

In 2010 he landed the first fakie-to-fakie 900 in history, though that was on his own Mega Ramp at his place in Vista, California, not in competition. His ranch with the giant ramp is at this point almost as famous as he is.

On March 26, 2012, a 12-year-old kid named Tom Schaar landed the first 1080 in history on the Mega Ramp at Woodward West: three full rotations, Guinness-certified.

Weeks later he stomped it in competition at X Games Asia in Shanghai and took gold, becoming the youngest X Games gold medalist at the time. Today he's competing at the elite level in park: silver medal at Paris 2024.

Nyjah debuted at the X Games in 2006 at age 11, the youngest competitor the contest had ever seen. Since then he's stacked the record for Skateboard Street golds: eleven according to Guinness as of mid-2024, and still counting. No other skater has dominated a single X Games discipline for that long.

His style — massive rails, robot-level contest consistency — defined the era when street skating fully professionalized on the comp circuit, with Rob Dyrdek's Street League and the X Games feeding off each other from 2013 onward.

The Brazilian stacked up 12 women's medals (6 golds, 3 silvers, 3 bronzes) and the record for golds in women's street, with five. Guinness handed her certificates for both records at the 2022 X Games. Throughout the entire 2010s she was the face of women's skateboarding worldwide, on and off the competition scene.

Her record for total golds has already found a new owner (Australian Arisa Trew surpassed it in 2025), but Bufoni's role was something else entirely: proving that a female skater could fill magazine covers, ad campaigns, and podiums on the same level as any male star.

On August 3, 2019, in the Big Air final in Minneapolis, Mitchie Brusco landed the first 1260 in history: three and a half rotations. He'd tried it in Shanghai a few months earlier with no luck. Tony Hawk, who knows a thing or two about the subject, was one of the first to congratulate him publicly.

The detail that makes the story even better: even with the best trick ever landed in the event, he didn't take gold. Elliot Sloan was more consistent and Brusco walked away with silver.

Brazilian skater Gui Khury landed the first 1080 on a vert ramp in history back in May 2020, at age 11, in the middle of the pandemic, on a backyard ramp in Curitiba. The following year he repeated it in competition at X Games 2021, at 12 years old, taking Best Trick in vert in front of a lineup that included Tony Hawk himself, who competed at 53.

Khury was already the youngest athlete in X Games history (he debuted in 2019 at age 10). At Chiba 2024 he kept pushing: first kickflip body varial 900 in competition.

In October 2022, ESPN sold control of the X Games to MSP Sports Capital (the same investment group behind McLaren Racing), retaining a minority stake and U.S. broadcast rights. Tony Hawk joined the buying group as a brand advisor.

For viewers, the change shows in the format: tighter editions, more international presence (Chiba in 2022 and 2023, Osaka in 2025), and a clear push to reclaim the role of annual skate showcase it held back in the 2000s.

Australian skater Arisa Trew, gold medalist in park at Paris 2024, now holds the women's records: first woman to land a 900 (2024) and eight X Games golds after Salt Lake City 2025, the most in women's history. All before turning 16.

And she's not an isolated case: at Ventura 2024, fellow Australian Mia Kretzer became the youngest medalist in X Games history at age 9. Records that used to be set by adult skaters are now being broken by teenagers and kids.

For 2026 the organization has announced the X Games League (XGL): an annual co-ed team league with eight clubs spanning winter and summer sports, and a draft in Los Angeles in March 2026. The first two confirmed summer stops are Sacramento (June 26–28) and a date in Japan in early July.

It's the biggest format shake-up in the event's thirty-year history. If it works, competitive skate will have its first-ever regular team season — something even Street League never attempted.