Three Americans Top Men’s Park Quarter Final at Dew Tour Long Beach 2019

Wrapping up day two of competition under dark skies and bright lights, the Men’s Park Quarter Final finished an already action-packed day with a bang at Dew Tour Long Beach 2019. Fighting for valuable Olympic qualification points, the riding in the newly designed bowl left skaters and fans alike fired up to see more in the events still to come.

Broken into two heats of 15, each skater had three 45-second runs with only the best score counting. Unlike previous years, though, skaters were not allowed to restart if they fell on the first trick attempted a.k.a. the ‘first wall rebate’. In compliance with Olympic competition formats, after any fall the run is considered over. Thirty men from 12 countries made up the start list for the Quarter Final, but only 12 were allowed to continue on into the Semi Final to skate against an already pre-seeded 12.

“I actually didn’t know [Ayumu Hirano] was a professional snowboarder until someone just mentioned he won second place at the Olympics. That’s Rad!” commented Pedro Barros, eager to compete while watching on as he was already pre-seed into the Semi Final.

Barros went on to compliment the new face around the bowl, though well-recognized for riding a snowboard. “His style is unique in skateboarding. It’s not like he skates like a snowboarder, he skates like a skateboarder. He is the first person I’ve seen be able to do it like that… all of the Japanese skaters coming out are showing a lot of potential.”

Unfortunately for Hirano it was not his best night on a skateboard, and he was not able to advance. The night in fact belonged to a handful of Americans.

As the night came to a close it was Cory Juneau, Alex Sorgente and Tristan Rennie topping out the leaderboard, making for a very strong American showing. Though they all showed a mastery around the bowl, Juneau’s signature frontside boardslide to start off each of his runs proved to be the most discerning.

Juneau also showed off his ability to lazily frontside blunt slide in the deep end as well as launch above coping and land into backside noseblunt. He also landed a variety of tricks on the Mountain Dew Can extension wall most impressively an ollie into a frontside 5-0 pivot back out to fakie.

The only disappointing part of the event came with elimination of fan favorites such as Oskar Rozenberg, Trey Wood, Karl Berglind, Kevin Kowalski and the previously mentioned Ayumu Hirano.

Tune in and see who can keep their momentum rolling into the Men’s Park Semi Final on Saturday at 12:45pm PT on DewTour.com/LIVE.

Men’s Park Quarter Final Results 

1.) Cory Juneau, USA 81.66
2.) Alex Sorgente, USA 75.00
3.) Tristan Rennie, USA 73.00
4.) Alessandro Mazzara, ITA 71.50
5.) Rune Glifberg, DEN 69.00
6.) Ivan Federico, ITA 64.00
7.) Curren Caples, USA 63.83
8.) Pedro Quintas, BRA 63.00
9.) Kensuke Sasaoka, JPN 62.63
10.) Collin Graham, USA 62.40
11.) Danny Leon, ESP 60.76
12.) Cj Collins, USA 60.53