LOS ANGELES -- Skateboarder Alexis Sablone will be studying architecture in the master's degree program at MIT starting this fall, but first she stopped by X Games in Los Angeles to deliver a dissertation on style on the Women's Skateboard Street course. Sablone beat out Leticia Bufoni and Rachel Reinhard to claim her second X Games gold and bringing her X Games medal tally to four: two silver and two gold.
"The course really scared me at first," Sablone said after the competition, noting that she's been spending most of her time skating the streets of Los Angeles and Brooklyn, New York and isn't used to riding transition or banks. "All these banks are not really my thing."
Sablone was the only skater making use of the roof gap and several of the biggest street-inspired features on the course, which was designed to look like a schoolyard. In her best run she landed a kickflip over the roof gap and a kickflip down a massive ledge into a bank, then reversed her path and ollied back up the ledge from the bank. She also landed a clean kickflip frontside 50-50 grind down a picnic table banked on the course's stair set.
"Oh my god, I'm so stoked, I can't believe it! I was so nervous," Sablone said, after the competition. "The first run is the one that counts for me, so I felt okay once I got that out of the way. I was so nervous last night that I barely slept. I woke up at 6 a.m., took a shower, and was ready to go. All the girls skated great. I still can't believe I won."
Bufoni was floating stylish melon graps over the cement hip on the course in each of her runs and popping big frontside 180s off of a dinosaur-shaped ledge created for the course by Los Angeles-based street artist James Haunt, grabbing the silver medal. And Reinhard bumped 2011 gold medalist Marisa Dal Santo off the podium and double kickflipped her way to bronze -- her first X Games medal -- in her final run, landing the double kickflip off the bank and over a chain feature on the course in a run that also included a backside 5-0 grind on the bank-to-bench, a frontside boardslide down the biggest rail on the course, and a frontside nosegrind on the picnic table down the stairs.
Dal Santo finished in fourth place, ahead of Lacey Baker (who qualified for Finals in first place) and women's street skating pioneer Elissa Steamer.
Highlights from the Women's Skate Street competition will air on Saturday on ESPN from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET, alongside coverage from the Men's Skateboard Game of Sk8 and Men's Skateboard Park contests.
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