🎨 Graphic by Francesco Pini
📊 Ballot Count by 4PLY
The results are in and we now have a snapshot of skateboarding in 2025, as voted on by QS readers. Unlike past years, when there was sometimes only a few vote split between first and second place, ties, etc., for the most part, everything cleanly landed where it landed this year.
And it should be said that this listing was voted on between 10:30 A.M. on Monday, December 8th until 5:30 P.M. on Friday, December 12th. Chris Joslin’s “G-Ma” part, which would earn him Thrasher‘s S.O.T.Y. trophy, was released around noon on Wednesday the 10th. Zion Wright’s part was released the morning of Thursday, the 11th. A similar thing happened the year that Miles Silvas won S.O.T.Y. But one hill we will gladly die on is that nobody wants to talk about year-end recap stuff in the following year. We will extend eligibility to any parts that came out starting December 8th into next year’s ranking.
To anyone just joining us: This is NOT a selection curated by QS staff. Editors and contributors can vote, but this was tallied across hundreds of publicly submitted ballots. If you’re interested in the methodology, 4PLY broke down how we tally the votes ✨
The Best Skate Videos of 2025
The Best Video Parts of 2025
10. Ben Kadow — HOCKEY IV
The boardslide and 5050 are faithful tools when it comes to navigating some of the hairier spots. The fact that they are “basic” tricks make them relatable – that we see Kadow employ them in exemplary fashion on some of the more difficult pieces of New York terrain (those green square Parks Department flat bars that he pops out of a boardslide on are terrifying) gives us a direct understanding of how gnarly he is. Kadow’s choice of filmed tricks have skill, recognizability, danger, and flare so obvious that he is the only skater my [non-skating] girlfriend enjoys watching, sitting down with a “who’s this hardcore guy?” inquiry to finish out this part.
There’s a perfect, fast flatground backside 360, a perfectly-imperfect curb-cut switch frontside flip over a can, and a backside grab to smith on the Police Plaza 14-rail here, so you know that Ben can probably do all manners of other tricks. He is choosing to construct his part out of basics, employing his power and staredowns on some of the taller, passed over portions of New York staples. Like the boardslide itself, Ben’s skating makes us feel something. — Adam Abada
9. Diego Todd — HOCKEY IV
Hockey IV is a reminder that the best way to set the tone for a video is a devastating first part, in this case, one delivered by Diego Todd.
Clips of Todd’s nimble footwork and ability to flip out of anything are on full display, with Todd kickflipping out of bluntslides into ditches, before going full stuntman and destroying himself doing tricks into a massive freeway underpass. Wallriding a fence over a gap from the top of a building? Leaping off a roof to an insanely tight wallride upon landing? Todd handles it all while showcasing a greater technical prowess than ever before.
Todd would later note how many of his clips, like the frontside tailslide 270 heelflip out and his backside tailslide big flip out ender at the L.A. High banks were NBDs, a testament to the upstart pro pushing his own limits for Hockey IV. This summer smash, quickly followed by a Stüssy part, kept him in the 2025 S.O.T.Y. conversation, a testament to a hell of a year for this pillar of Benny Magliano’s cinematic lens. — José Vadi
8. Gustav Tønnesen
— adidas: “3:2“
Magic is always mentioned when Gustav Tønnesen turns up. His wizardly style and hermetic reserve have earned him a sorcerer’s mystique. He’s become Gustav the Grey, conjurer of the consummate question: how’d he do that?
I’m a skeptic by trade; I check facts for a living. Magic, I know, is make-believe, a confidence game that depends on artifice and trickery. So I’ve watched “3:2” two dozen times to identify the ways in which Gustav and his assistant behind the scenes, Fritte Söderström, sell the miraculous effect.
One method is mirrors. The opening line — a regular backtail pretzel, then a goofy one — makes switch seem like a simple illusion. Misdirection, of course, is major. Like a game of monte, he shows you all the cards: impossible noseslide, you follow? Then the next clip shuffles them up and reveals something you never knew was even in the mix — switch tail, front foot impossible out.
Contortionism enters the act. He twists his lower half independent of his top as if he’s sawed himself in two. Several sleights of single-footed levitation — including a switch backside boneless and a fandangle nose manual — seem to bend earthly physics out of shape.
The ender lands like a fantastic feat of fortune telling: a switch shuv late front shuv whose very motion predicts the coming rewind. Have I gone mental, or is this some mentalism? — Christian N. Kerr
7. Tristan Funkhouser
— Baker: Gimmie A Break!
Before Thrasher announced S.O.T.Y. this year, I overheard a skatepark conversation about who might win: “There are like ten dudes who deserve it,” one skater said. “TJ, Gabbers, Simon Bannerot… Shit, T-Funk too, but he puts all his footage out at the beginning of the year like a cool guy.”
The implication was that he does it on purpose to avoid any semblance of campaigning for a trophy. I’m not sure skateboarding’s awards season is even on Tristan Funkhouser’s radar. Watch his part in Gimmie a Break! and tell me if you think this guy — who frontside boardslides into a 20-foot retaining wall in a GG Allin “I’M YOUR ENEMY” t-shirt — is making a lot of careful calculations.
T-Funk has been gnarly for over a decade, but he’s reached a new level since he entered his San Francisco period. His skating is hungry, scratching, violent. Sideburned and mulleted, he screams down the city’s hills.
Frontside grind into the tallest part of Federal Banks; obscene. Tre flip over the top at Casting Ponds; unheard of. And then, to end it off, a channel gap no one else would imagine (at a spot he skated ten-plus years ago.) Compile T-Funk’s 2025 output and it’s more skate-and-destroy than any of his competitors’. “Phelps would give T-Funk the trophy,” a popular comment on the video reads. Maybe — but who cares? He’s fulfilling a much more primal need. — Max Harrison-Caldwell
6. Antonio Durao
— “HARDBODY INTERLUDE“
I’ve spent some of the year being annoyed at incorrect use of the literary term “magical realism,” but it rightly applies to Antonio Durao’s “Interlude.” It’s the trope of making the banal magical and the magical banal. All of that alchemy is at work in this slender offering of just two and half minutes. Everything is curated to leave you astounded, mesmerized, and unsettled. The layering of this part is what blows the mind; it is brief, but has all you might ever want. And yes, that foot nonchalantly lifted at the very last moment in an act of brazen absurdity. It is a small motif that whispers to the set, “I am bigger than you.” A switch frontside flip down Wallenberg is magical, lifting the front foot off before landing is like seeing a unicorn commute home on the subway. Magic as banal.
This was a part that left us all entranced: a touring vintage BMW, snowy mountain peaks, and a pronounced absence of New York footage. The switch back tail at Pulaski sates as the appropriate ender, leaving you thinking of the gauntlet thrown to Tiago. But the lingering moment of genius in this video is the switch back 5050 at L.A. High. Durao’s skateboarding prompts us to think differently, and question that balance between what we want and what we need. A backside 5050 is familiar, relatable, but done switch on such an obstacle? The banal as magic. — Paul O’Connor
5. Cyrus Bennett — “Blackout Try“
Cyrus Bennett and Ben Chadourne’s all-Parisian “Blackout Try” part was uploaded on January 27th of this year, eons in 2025 skateboard time. Yet, the Louvre kickflip, the broken bench, the bank-to-bank dismount, or the atypical switch frontside flip all made an impression. The part made it to December, voted on by those very same people who fret about the difficulty of remembering anything in an era of skate clips on infinite scroll, when the word of the year is “slop.”
Chadourne’s 2010’s pivot from French 5Boro teamrider to one of the videographers who would define how the world viewed Parisian skateboarding comes full circle here. From sporadic, endlessly rewound Vimeo uploads documenting a scene experiencing a rebirth, he would go on to make some of the most beloved videos of the past decade, always with Paris as an anchor point. Now, he serves as spot guide, cameraman, and collaborator to visiting friends as they deliver us more memories worth holding onto. (Hell, that one guy in the comments was invested in the fate of a broken bench halfway across the world.)
Watching “Blackout Try,” it’s hard not to feel a part of the crew celebrating at the bottom of Cyrus’ back tail down the hubba, or at least remember the last time you felt that way about one of your own friends rolling away from something nice. — Quartersnacks
4. Antonio Durao — “Immigration Part“
There is always that argument about how Instagram has profoundly changed the way we all experience skateboarding, but maybe it’s boosting the chicken over the egg, or however that’s supposed to work? What about the iPhone? And what about its ability to capture, at least temporarily, a semblance of what it’s like to see Antonio Durao skate?
Thank you, phones, for providing us with the immediacy and chaos of Durao’s “Immigration” part. He plays the hits in there – switch frontside flips and switch 360 flips, alongside obscurities like that one-footer 5-0 down the Banks rail and the backside nollie 180 kickout down the triple-set in downtown L.A. How about that switch flip noseslide to tailslide?
Normally a real camera might be called in for the flurry of flips that end the part at the World Trade stairs, but no, futzing with focus and white balance or whatever would detract from the spontaneity. Just point the phone. — Mike Munzenrider
3. Eetu Toropainen — “Pass~Port Presents Eetu Toropainen“
The words “Welcome to relaxation 101. Please take a seat and enjoy this tape,” smoothly greet us into what is basically the video part equivalent of soap cutting ASMR.
The opening Super-8 montage, full of peaceful Finnish scenery, encourages us to drop our shoulders and take a deep breath before we’re sent into the dreamlike skateboarding of Eetu Toropainen. Scored to the ethereal sounds of Slowdive and Oneothrix Point Never that accentuate the air of calmness that radiates around Eetu — even when inches from falling off a roof — he still looks like he’s in complete control.
The part is also a clear indication that even though his name is now on a board, he has no intention of slowing down. And it’s true: within 24 hours of the premiere and turning pro, he and Dylan Jaeb were already doing ridiculous lines at Helsinki’s underground double-sets for Instagram as if it were some kind of joke. And Nike, if you know what’s good, it’s time for the Eetu and Dylan shared part. Bobby and Hjalte style. — Josh Sabini
2. Gabriel Summers — “Gabbers“
2025 was a year of Instagram throwaways from the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge that could have been enders; Gabbers’ contribution was a proper heelflip and a crook on the Police Plaza 16. The S.O.T.Y. season buzzer beater part showed us classic seasoning on his grind game, like a crispy-ass shove it onto a double-digit round bar 5050, while also holding noseslide-to-back-tail on a ledge that’s 30+ feet long.
A Kirchart-ian blatant disregard for life, limb, and streetlights in landings is obviously part of the appeal here. Some rail skaters bail like gazelles, and Summers nonchalantly breaks a finger redoing his own NBD for an “Out There.” The Handrail Guy archetype can be brooding, but Gabbers is laughing on the sesh, ripping a cigarette with blood pouring out. He chuckles when he finally rolls away. — Ian Browning
1. Bobby De Keyzer — Quasi: “BOBCBC“
In “BOBCBC,” the principle version of Bobby De Kezyer’s tricks and lines are shrouded in revisions, attempts and bails. The “makes” are a fraction of its 24-minute runtime, which depicts the activity and anguish of filming a video part through a self-imposed window.
From September 12th to November 25th 2024, De Kezyer and videographer Tomas Morrison repeatedly retuned to Simcoe Park, a spot next to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s studio and office building in Toronto.
Drifting across coarse ground to polished benches on the periphery of the spot, De Keyzer almost always returns to its centre: a configuration of notched brown ledges that contain an island bisected by a curved path. In lines, he might cut through it like a river. Or use a flip trick as a bridge between manuals. He pops up and off it to clear the ledges on its perimeter, notably hopping up in switch before whirling a switch 360 flip out of there. What would, in any other instance be an ender, is confined to the chronology of when it was captured.
“BOBCBC” makes us a firsthand witness to progression; the backside tailslide big spin that ends an early line later begins another, bookended by the regular, followed by the switch. The clockwork precision of De Keyzer’s form is echoed by Morrison’s editing. “If you can communicate that feeling we all get from skateboarding and put it into a video, that is special. That’s what I think good cinema is. Bringing people into a world,” Morrison told QS earlier this year.
In confining that world to running laps around a park in Toronto, De Keyzer and Morrison ran circles around the visual language of the skate video itself. — Farran Golding
Past Readers Polls: Best Videos & Parts of 2024, Best Videos & Parts of 2023, Best Videos & Parts of 2022, Best Videos & Parts of 2021, Best Videos & Parts of 2020, Best Videos of the 2010s, Best Parts of the 2010s
I always feel like for ppl who actually follow skating, these things tend to get it as right as they can save a bit of recency bias but your case for cyrus maybe softens that a bit
Nobody will remember Joslin’s part outside of the two big tricks and #17 is where it belongs as a PART
You gave him #1 trick, no need to extend eligibility next year bc some other crazy shit will happen down another famous spot by then and thrasher can placate the crowd with a passing interest that way
QS Readers Poll is the new Transworld Awards.
Kevin Baekkel at 16 is criminal, even tho the creature vid was pretty fried. And don’t get me wrong Antonio’s a bawse, but no chance that interlude part deserves the 6 spot. Not even close to his best work.
edglrd video got robbed
fkn Jasper Stieve NUMERO UNO
otherwise i’m good with this