Ryan Decenzo defends gold medal at Game of SK8 at 2012 X Games L.A.
Canada’s Ryan Decenzo had yet another successful year at X Games as he successfully defended his gold medal in the Game of SK8 competition that went down at the Event Deck at L.A. on Saturday, June 30.
Finishing in second place and consequently walking away with a silver medal was Ishod Wair, while his fellow countryperson Aaron “Jaws” Homoki completed the podium to take home the bronze.
Considering as the biggest stage of action sports, X Games attracts only the most talented athletes from around the globe to compete for the coveted gold medals, an acknowledgment of an athlete’s exquisite skills and phenomenal performance.
Decenzo, Wair, Homoki and America’s Mike “Lizard King” Plumb found themselves pitted against each other in the Game of SK8 competition on the third day of X Games. All four athletes had earned an invitation to the mega-event of action sports and that was
left for them to do was justify their presence in the battlefield and get themselves on the podium.
As the contest got underway, Plumb found himself picking all three letters of SK8 and getting sidelined early after failing to reproduce a switch lip-slide, a gap lip-slide to fake and a switch tail-slide landed by Decenzo.
The next one to get eliminated was Homoki. The 22-year-old New Jersey-based skater failed to land a 270 Switch crooks down the rail, a trick that both Wair and Decenzo had successfully pulled off. As a result, earning his third and final letter, Wair was
forced to settle for a bronze medal.
With Plumb and Homoki out, the contest for the top spot on the podium came down to a bout between Decenzo and Wair. Both the skaters have been exhibiting some solid technical skills and were expected to come at each other hard.
The 20-year-old Wair found himself with an upper hand after pulling off a backside hard-way flip over a banked stair gap, which Decenzo failed to reproduce. He tried to finish off his rival with a quarter-pipe nose-pick stall, but the defending gold medallist
successfully pulled it off to keep the battle alive.
Decenzo suddenly turned things around with a front-side shove-it and a switch feeble grind down the handrail. Wair failed to land both the tricks, consequently picking up the final two letters to find himself defeated.
“It was all about picking tricks that the other guys couldn't do, and they were doing the same to me,” Decenzo said after the competition. “Most of these guys don't skate rails switch too much, and it was the perfect rail for me to skate switch on.”
Decenzo, Wair and Homoki will be competing in the Skateboard Street final that is scheduled to take place on Sunday, July 1.
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