tangental to the video, but relevant to the soty chat:
am i the only one who thinks it's weird that people seem to think mark suciu somehow created the precedent for putting a lot of footage and winning soty?
foy put out four parts in 2017 (if you count his am scramble footage as a part) mason did the same in 2020. milton's 'single part' win in 2019 was an 11 minute part...
tyshawn's the only dude from the last half decade to win off a vaguely normal amount of footie. even then, he had a two song part plus an extra part.
if the incentive of soty makes top dudes film like crazy, i'm all for it.
I agree 100% with this.
However, you have to admit that things like the timing of footage release are very contrived. You can tell when someone is specifically gunning for it in a way that I don't feel is in the spirit of the award. Doesn't feel in the spirit of street skating.
I like that it creates more of a meritocracy than the Thrasher guys just going "oh man I saw this guy skate in person, so he gets SOTY" like they often did in the 2010s. Milton Martinez very much felt like that (I still think he deserved it, but you know what I mean).
But there is something to be said about maintaining that essence of street skateboarding and not making it be some career-driven achievement like us Millennials have been manipulated by our whole lives. It's okay to fight back against that idea of objective achievement and have some subjective enjoyment/vibes driving it as well.
We should celebrate fighting back against this Capitalist career achiever mentality, while also celebrating guys like Suciu who put two years straight into giving us an avalanche of top tier skating in pursuit of the award.
There needs to be a balance or it will devolve into giving that same feeling that contest skating often gives us. That very fake facade that comes with objectivity and being driven by achievement rather than being driven by self-expression, the joy of skateboarding, and the joy of saying "fuck you and your award".
My favorite contest runs are when people spit in the face of the contest. When people join the contest just to rebel against it. I want a skater to do that against SOTY.