Skateboarder Gui Khury dreams of ‘insane’ Olympics after 2021

Gui Khury’s 2021 was “insane”, as defined by the boy who, at age 12, hit an unprecedented maneuver at the X Games.

In July, in California, the young Brazilian skater completed the first 1,080 degree spin in history in a vertical ramp competition.

Gui thus fulfilled the plan outlined a year earlier, when he got the maneuver right for the first time during training on the track set up at his grandmother’s house in Campo Largo (metropolitan region of Curitiba). At the time, he was already planning to take the three-round movement to the world’s premier extreme sports event.

“In a few months I managed to do all the things I could imagine for the next five or ten years,” says the boy, with a mixture of wonder and amusement.

To get to 1080°, you have to go through stages, something he started doing very early on. At the age of six, he completed the 540th, at seven, the 720th, at eight, the 900th, a maneuver immortalized by Tony Hawk in 1999 and which made the Brazilian enter Guinness World Records for the first time as the youngest to hit it .

The idea of ​​looking for the unprecedented spin came when seeing the attempts of Shaun White, American phenomenon of skateboarding and snowboarding. It took Gui almost a year to get the move right for the first time and he has repeated it two others to this day, one of them in the X Games. It’s not something to do anytime, just in “special moments” as you define it.

“He needs strength when he comes back from the maneuver, because there’s a lot of pressure on his legs. Because he’s small, he can turn faster, but all this involves technique. And you have to reconcile the two: strength and speed”, explains the father, Ricardo Khury Filho.

A former amateur skateboarder who encouraged his son in the sport from an early age, he believes that the period of the pandemic has helped Gui to evolve even more quickly, with online classes and more free time to walk behind his grandmother’s farm.

The idea of ​​building a private space for training came when the family lived in California and the boy had already started to stand out in the sport. Upon returning to Brazil in 2015, the plan was put into practice.

“I sold a motorcycle to buy the plates for the track, and that’s how it all started. It was supposed to be a little track in the backyard of my grandmother’s house, but when we got here, he had already performed some maneuvers, and we decided to build a track to the standards competition,” recalls Ricardo.

The place, called the Greenbox, currently has a covered halfpipe (U-shaped track) and a bowl (pool-shaped track). Eventually skaters close to the family are welcomed to practice at the site.

Last weekend, in Florianópolis, Gui participated in the Red Bull Skate Generation, an event held in the bowl of the multi-champion of the park modality and Olympic medalist Pedro Barros.

About to turn 13, the age he reached this Saturday (18), he won a custom helmet from the Austrian company and had his relationship with the brand, one of its five sponsors, disclosed for the first time.

Despite still competing as an amateur athlete in some tournaments because of their age group, Curitiba is an increasingly present figure in elite championships.

In addition to the X Games and Generation, he participated in December at the STU Open, which is the main event on the Brazilian circuit and brings together athletes from the two Olympic disciplines, park and street. The vertical, which for the time being is out of the Games, is being considered for entry into the Los Angeles-2028 program.

Gui was fourth in the park at the STU and showed that from now on he can also be treated as a candidate to fulfill his dream of going to the Olympics in this modality.

Whether it will be possible to do this in Paris-2024 will depend on its evolution in the coming years and also on the possibility of creating a minimum age limit to compete in the Games, a topic that is still under discussion by the international federation (World Skate) after the success achieved by teenagers in Tokyo.

Gui saw and reviewed the sport’s Olympic debut on TV, paying close attention to the competitors’ performance. “I always think about how the guy managed to win that medal, but I already have this answer: it’s training and having fun”, he says.

The family’s desire is that skating is always something natural and spontaneous for him, even with all the excitement generated by his precocious feats.

At Generation, which brought together athletes from different generations, Gui was one of the main attractions and excited the tournament guests with his performance in the bowl. When trying to hit a 900°, he fell and hit his head, which generated a moment of apprehension, fortunately without more serious consequences.

Ricardo and Bianca Zardo, the boy’s mother, were with him at the event and were naturally worried. But, as parents of a sports phenomenon, they understand that falls are part of the evolutionary process.

“He knows the moment of what he wants to do and feels that he is capable. A maneuver like the 900 is very strong, there is no way for a person to try to do it without taking falls and falling. There are several falls for you to achieve perfection”, says the dad.