Valencia becomes the European capital of skateboarding. The road to the event that will take place this weekend in La Marina Real has been long and its script is typical of an urban legend, although everything is true in his case. The dream started a small skate shop called Zityest in 2005. There Llorens Miralles and Hugo Miralles, cousins and lovers of the board, made their work their passion and began to organize events to promote their sport. The activities grew until in 2015 they organized the first URBNS festival in the Turia Riverbed where 1,500 people came to his surprise. The next step was to create the Club Esportiu URBNS and, six years later, all that passion for urban sports was born VESO (Valencia European Skate Open), a festival that will concentrate 4,000 people around skateboarding, which will not be more because the pandemic prevents it.
The VESO festival will be the first stop in Spain of the Roller Experience 360, with the dispute of the European and Spanish Championships for men and women of roller freestyle and scooter in park and street, as well as the International Skateboarding Open in the street modality. “An event of this level has never been seen in Valencia,” he tells AS Llorens Miralles. Valencia, with the involvement of the institutions, the support of the Trinidad Alfonso Foundation and the organization of the Valencian Skating Federation and the Club Esportiu URBNS, will receive several of the world’s leading skateboarding figures, among others. Mauro Iglesias, Bruno senra, Richard Tury or Valencians and applicants to get a place in the next Olympics Lucas Amador and Javier Fioretto.
“The visibility of Tokyo 2020 has changed our lives,” acknowledges Vicent Martí, President of the Skating Federation of the Valencian Community. The data on the shores of the Mediterranean reflect this: last year the figure of 1500 federated was exceeded and currently there are more than 25 clubs. “Skateboarding is already seen as a sport, with a regulated competition and it does not lose its essence,” says Llorens Miralles. “Skate is a culture, a way of life, and that will never be lost, but regulating competitions also helps them see us as a sporting practice and obviously being in Tokyo and also in Paris has relaunched skateboarding”, he emphasizes Llorens.
A lifestyle, an urban culture
VESO collects precisely all that culture that Llorens talks about. “It is a sporting event with a marked urban festival profile, which it is too,” he says. There is your schedule of activities: dance exhibitions, children’s workshops, food truck area and multiple live performances by DJs and groups of different musical styles. And all this with free access, although due to that capacity limit, you have to reserve a seat in advance through the event’s website (there are no longer reservations for the day on Saturday).
“VESO is going to multiply the visibility of skateboarding in its different modalities”, says with effusiveness Vicent Martí, who explains that in the last two years there has been a “boom in our sport”. The age with which kids approach skateboarding has been lowered, which allows them to improve their training. “The age group in which they began to approach us was 15 or 16 years old and now we already have schools with children of 4 and 5 years old.” Skateboarding has also entered the eye of public institutions and the construction of facilities has multiplied since it was classified as an Olympic discipline. “And there we have Valencian companies that are building parks throughout Spain,” says Llorens Miralles, who will inaugurate the VESO festival 16 years after opening that store called Zityest.
