Mia Kretzer won Women's Skateboard Vert Best Trick gold at X Games Chiba 2026 with a trick no woman had landed in vert competition before: the alley-oop one-foot 540. She was 11 years old, making her the youngest gold medalist in X Games history.
A Trick Built on Rotation and Timing
The alley-oop one-foot 540 asks a skater to spin backward into the direction they came from, land on a single foot, and hold it — a combination most riders twice Kretzer's age have not attempted in competition. Landing it clean, on the biggest stage her sport offers, was enough to win Best Trick outright.
Best Trick events are judged on a single scored attempt rather than a full run, which means Kretzer's gold rested entirely on the one trick she chose to land.
Kretzer's run took place at X Games Chiba on July 5, 2026, in front of a field built almost entirely of adult competitors. Age gaps like that are common in skateboarding's newest disciplines; a gold medal at the top of one is not.
A Record Inside a Record
The trick itself carries NBD status — skateboarding's shorthand for a maneuver never done before at this level. Kretzer's win folded two firsts into one afternoon in Chiba: the first woman to land the move in a vert competition, and the youngest athlete in any discipline to stand on an X Games podium as champion.
Both records now stand as reference points for whoever attempts to break them next in this event — one measured in degrees of rotation, the other in years lived.
At 11, Kretzer has already set the kind of benchmark that usually takes a career to reach. What she does with the years now ahead of her is the more interesting question.
