© Jared Souney

Sunny San Diego’s Skate Prelims

San Diego did not disappoint with the skate vert field at the Action Sports USA Championships. Only a few of the usual suspects were missing, Bob Burnquist, Bucky Lasek and Sandro Dias the most noticeable. But almost every other big name in Vert came out for the event. The two most notable names: Pierre Luc Gagnon and Alex Perelson. 

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of Gagnon, or maybe you know him better by his nickname, PLG. If your memory is a bit fuzzy, he won the X Games last year. But this year he has been MIA, due to a rather serious injury. A broken patella and torn quad muscle kept him out of competition all summer. This weekend marked his first competition back, and although he spent a solid half hour icing it post skating, he looked solid and snuck into the finals in ninth place.

Perelson is a name you may not be so familiar with. This was, after all, his first pro competition ever. At 15 years old, he’s already won Tampa Am and some other amateur events, but now he’s entered the big leagues. With amplitude that rivaled skaters like Shaun White and Sandro Dias, Perelson has arrived in vert skating, and he even beat PLG his first time out, qualifying in eighth. 

The real man of the hour was Rune Glifberg though. He threw down such a solid run first effort, that he got to show off his bag of technical lip tricks, since there was no way he wasn’t moving on. Glifberg is the master of tech, but even he isn’t confident enough with a kickflip backside lipslide to throw it in unless he knows he’s already qualified. So his safety net enabled him to throw a completely unorthodox run. And when he did attempt that kickflip lipslide, he rode away without any trouble.