Filipe Mota Lands NBD Best Trick for Silver and a Fourth X Games Medal

A trick without precedent, on the Hubba ledge

The moment arrived on Filipe Mota's third attempt. On a session judged on a single best trick, the Brazilian took the Hubba ledge and answered it with a nollie backside bigspin heelflip to backside tailslide to backside bigspin out. The judges deemed it a never-been-done. It carried him to silver in the Monster Energy Men's Skateboard Street Best Trick final at MoonPay X Games Chiba 2026, and to his fourth X Games medal.

ICNX NBD. The distinction matters here. In street skating, an NBD is a trick landed in competition for the first time in recorded history. Mota did not win the day, but he added a line to the record that had not existed before he dropped in.

How the final unfolded

The setting was Makuhari Messe in Chiba City, on the opening Saturday of the weekend. The Chiba crowd witnessed the next level of technical moves in the final, and in a session peppered with tricks otherwise only seen in video parts, Brazilian rider Filipe Mota unleashed a complex technical trick to claim the silver medal. The Hubba ledge was the proving ground. Mota's sequence stacked rotation upon rotation, entering and exiting the tailslide with bigspins on both ends. It held together where others fell apart.

Gold went the way of experience and consistency. Free Agent Juni Kang won his second career Men's Skateboard Street Best Trick X Games gold in Chiba after also winning gold in Sacramento, which made him Korea's first gold medalist in any Summer discipline. Both of Kang's landed tricks were X Games firsts, and judges deemed them outright NBDs: a switch heelflip backside tailslide to backside bigspin out on the Hubba ledge in Run 6, and an earlier switch 180 crooked grind to nollie heelflip out in Run 3. Bronze fell to a home favourite. The Men's Skateboard Street Best Trick final closed with Sora Shirai from Sagamihara, Japan, whose Cab backside tailslide to backside bigspin out the Hubba ledge helped earn him third place.

Where it sits in the arc

Mota is twenty, and he skates for a country with deep roots in the discipline. Twenty-year-old Filipe Mota from Patos de Minas, Brazil, took silver with a high-tech move. The result is not an isolated flash. The judges also deemed Mota's nollie backside bigspin heelflip to backside tailslide to backside bigspin out an NBD, and he now holds four medals — one gold, two silver, one bronze — from five Street Best Trick starts, putting him second for most medals in the discipline.

Read against that record, Chiba is the work of a rider who keeps returning to the same stage and keeps leaving with something. One gold. Two silvers. A bronze. Each entry made on his own terms, at the technical edge of the sport. The trick that carried him this time had never been landed in competition before. He landed it, and moved on.

A quiet line for the ledger. Filipe Mota keeps writing tricks the record had not yet seen.