Young skateboarder makes history with 1080-degree turn on vertical ramp
Last year Gui Khury became the youngest competitor at the X-Games to complete a 900 – now he's done a 1080. Instagram: Gui Khury
The closure of schools in Brazil due to the coronavirus pandemic gave 11-year-old prodigy Gui Khury plenty of time to perfect his skateboarding skills as he became the first person to land a 1080-degree turn on a vertical ramp.
More than two decades after Tony Hawk completed the first 900-degree turn, Gui shattered a long-standing record by flying off the top of a ramp and completing three full spins in the air before landing cleanly and skating off.
The manoeuvre has long been one of the holy grails of skateboarding.
“The isolation for the coronavirus helped because he had a life that was about school and he didn’t have a lot of time to train, when he got home from school he was tired,” Gui’s father, Ricardo Khury Filho, said.
“Now he is at home more, he eats better and he has more time to train and can focus more on the training, so that has helped.
“He has an opportunity to train here, if he didn’t have [the skate facilities] … he would be stuck at home like everyone else and unable to do sport. So the isolation helped him focus.”
During lockdown, Gui and his family have been making the 20-minute journey to his grandmother’s house on most days to deliver food and drop him off so he can train on the vertical ramp, bowl and street course they had built in her back garden.
It was on that ramp that the pre-teen completed his historic feat.
Tweet from @XGames
He was already the youngest skateboarder to complete the 900-degree turn, a feat he pulled off aged eight – before later landing one at last year’s X-Games.
“I was like, ‘oh my God, what did I just do?'” Gui said on Sunday, two days after achieving his historic 1080.
“I was just like, ‘OK, I landed it. Now I am going to celebrate’.”
The boy’s celebration was “mac and cheese at home” with his family.
Skateboarding great Hawk landed the first 900 in 1999, nine years before Gui was born.