How to judge Olympic street skateboarding: Exclusive insights from head street judge Garrett Hill

Skateboarding will be back with a bang when it returns to the Olympic stage for Paris 2024.

Dynamic, strategic, and skilful, it is an athletic art form practised by people all around the world - and the contest arena brings a level of skateboarding like no other.

As the road to Paris rolls on, Olympics.com sat down with World Skate’s head street skateboarding judge Garrett Hill to dig deeper into the topic of judging and try to answer some of the burning questions that come with assessing what is a highly creative and highly technical sport.

What is 'good' skateboarding? How are the criteria used for assessing skaters established? Why is the judging different at different events?

Having started skateboarding at 10 years old before turning professional at the age of 12, 36-year-old Hill is familiar with the ins and outs of what it takes to be a skateboarder at the top of the game.

After being invited to judge an event, Hill has scored at some of the sport’s most elite contests including Street League Skateboarding, X Games, and Dew Tour before turning his hand to becoming a judge for World Skate.

Hill was part of the team for Tokyo 2020 and will be the head judge at Paris 2024.

Here is our Q&A with Garrett Hill.

For a detailed breakdown of how the judging process works for World Skate and Olympic events see here.

What is the purpose of a judge at a skateboarding contest?

GH: The purpose of a judge in a skate contest is to try and accomplish an impossible task, which is allocating a hard number to something that is completely subjective.

If me and you were to go out and do the same trick, someone may look at that trick differently and want to rate that trick differently, even though it's the same exact trick that we're doing in skateboarding. It's such a dynamic art form that it's kind of difficult to do that. So we've tried over the years to fine-tune what that criteria is and create these categories to help us accomplish that impossible task, right?

So, if I had to zoom in on each individual judge's job, I would say that it's their job to represent the version of skateboarding that they come from to the best of their ability: to give a fair and honest score.

How do you arrive at what good skateboarding is?

GH: It's a great question, right? Because that's such a massive question. What is skateboarding? Because it means something different to everyone.

What the challenge has been is - it's not our job to tell people what we think good skateboarding is. It's only our job to tell people what we think Olympic skateboarding is. And I think that's probably been the most difficult thing.

There are so many different flavours and brands. And it's coming from all over the world. It's very difficult for us to just be like, 'Well, this is the only kind of good skateboarding, you know?'

But in competitions, there are certain things that will put you ahead of your other competitors. There are certain parameters that we can now zoom in on and say, 'This is what is going to get you a higher score,' and just kind of skateboarding is what it is. So, we have done our best job to try and fine-tune that criteria.

What are the judging criteria and how did you arrive at them?

GH: To distribute a score to anything it does have to fall into all the different categories that we have for criteria. And, to be honest with you, it's a process.

In order to create the criteria, it has been a trial-and-error process. And there are lots of different categories that we choose from in order to give a fair score from the top down.

'Overall Impression' is, I'd say, if we put these on a totem pole, that'd be at the top of the totem pole.

'Overall Impression' is the most important criterion that we use as judges to give a score and within 'Overall Impression', that's execution - the way that you landed your trick - that's speed and style. Like somebody could do a flip trick an inch off the ground and then someone could do that same flip trick and pop it three feet off the ground and it's like the most amazing thing ever. So, we would fall into that criteria of style to a war to award that trick that was popped better and executed better, more points.

So, it's not as simple as this trick is worth this many points?

GH: It's been a topic that has been brought up quite a bit.

Is there a way to standardise point scores? Is that even possible? And from a strategy standpoint, if I were playing a board game, I would say, 'Yeah, let's do that. Every time you play Monopoly, the rules don't change every time. Boardwalk isn't worth a different amount'. But in skateboarding, I think that is a big reason why it's so different and why it's so special and why people gravitate towards it is because you can't really put a hard number to a trick.

And I don't think it would be fair to do that also because our course is changed every time we do an event, it's never the same course. So, to say that a kickflip is worth this much at this course and say that it's worth the same here, even though this spot's bigger and it's different, it doesn't really work.

There are too many variables. There are too many hypotheticals. And we try and adapt our scale to suit the course that we're skating.

When the skaters get the course preview, do you get the course reveal simultaneously?

GH: Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't. Sometimes I'll get kind of some plans for what the park is going to look like in advance. But as far as doing any prep work at that point, it's kind of tough because everything changes when you're standing on the course. And that brings me to the question.

One of the main reasons why I want all of my judges to be actual skateboarders is that we skate the course every time we're out there. [We are] rolling around and skating the actual obstacles so we can get a better grasp on our scoring and how to edit that scale that we use. And it's so important to do that because even when you're up in the judging booth, sometimes we're pretty far removed from the course.

When you're judging a skater, what standard are you holding them to?

GH: Judging a skater against what you think that they can do is probably the biggest thing to avoid. That's an absolute red flag - can't do it. You can't have any of my judges do it. We can't. It would never be fair to have a skater go out there and do a trick, 'That was good but we know they could do it better.' That wouldn't be fair, right?

So, we can never judge a skater against what we think their own capability is. We only judge based, a little bit of the park, but more of what we're seeing. The judging scale that we create is based on how difficult the skateboarding is.

Judges, we don't just show up the day of the contest fresh and just go to work. The majority of the work does happen during practice. That's really when we get to have the most amount of productive conversations, figure out the course and figure out what we're going to be rewarding, higher, what's going to get lower points. And that's really when we're figuring that scale out.

Are you watching every practice session?

GH: We watch all of it.

In practice, you get to see what kind of lines people are putting together. So you can start to put together some hypothetical scenarios and some hypothetical scores which would look something like this, 'If that skater were to land that run with that trick at the end on the Hubba, that really big trick, what would we get that score? What do we think that range of skating looks like?' And then the scale starts to come together, the ecosystem starts to come together and you can start to pretty much figure out what the course is.

What do you do when you see a trick you haven't seen before?

GH: It happens every event: every single event.

We're always surprised with the trick that we've never seen before. And, usually, everyone starts freaking out, right? Everyone's just so shocked at what they have just seen. And then after a couple of seconds, everyone calms down and then we get back to work because, at the end of the day, we're all skateboarders up there. We enjoy watching the skating just as much as everybody crowd does.

Do you start with a 100 for a run and deduct points?

GH: We're never looking for ways to deduct. We're always looking for ways to add to a score.

And that's always been kind of my creed that I've stuck to is that it's not my job to chop the head off of your score. I want to give you as many points as you deserve within the realm of fairness.

For those who watch other contests is the judging different from those to a World Skate or Olympic event?

GH: Yeah, it is different. There are different rules for one, that make a substantial difference in the strategy of the skaters and in events that aren't World Skate or Olympic qualifying events.

For example, in a World Skate event, your run score counts. And there are other contests where that run score doesn't count. So if you bomb on both of your runs, you can still make up for it in the single trick section, which is sort of the criteria that we had for the last Olympic cycle leading up to Tokyo.

There are different rules we have. We have something called a repetition rule, which comes into play a lot. That's where, if you're repeating the same trick or the same variation of a trick, you're going to receive a pretty substantial deduction for that. Our deduction isn't as harsh as some other contests. If you do the same trick in another contest, you may get a zero for repeating that trick. And in our event, you get a big deduction, but you're not out of the mix.

There are some that point to skaters winning those events but not World Skate or Olympic events. Why is that the case?

GH: Why isn't there a universal crossover, right? You know, one trick would be scored 50 in one contest and then over in a different contest, it could be scored 70. And to me, that is a massive difference. So even though it is not by any means a requirement for us to clock what other tricks are being scored at other events that aren't our events, we still do that. I still do that and I still have my judges team do that because I want them to. I want us to still have a solid grasp of what the skateboarding environment is. Even though we're hosting our own event. We're still a part of a bigger game, right? Or we're still a part of supporting.

And this is in an attempt to try and create some consistency. When we try and create that consistency, we need to be able to understand that, 'Oh, this trick normally gets scored nine and above. Does it make sense for that trick to get scored nine and above here? Is it fair for that trick to get scored nine and above because the spot is just as big at our course as it is there? Maybe we should.' So, we do try and create that consistency.

How do you think skateboarding has progressed since Tokyo and if it has, on what scale?

GH: It's hit the nitro boost.

The difficulty level of the tricks has monumentally increased even since Tokyo, and that wasn't even a long time ago. But we see the progression in these athletes in every event, especially in the women's division. We see that it's more enjoyable watching the women skate than the men in that regard because you see so much progression from event to event. New tricks, really difficult tricks that would hold their own in the men's category. It's so exciting to watch these skaters progress because we've been watching them for years at this point.

Any final remarks you would like to share?

GH: I would just say that skateboard judging, it isn't perfect, right? It's not a perfect thing, and I don't know if it will ever be. But, with hard work and with time and with as much dedication that we have towards it, that's what we strive for.

I'm always open to critiques and criticism and ways to make our job better. But that's what I love about skateboarding. You can't really define the edges always. You can't fully understand skateboarding just as much. You can't fully understand the process of skateboarding judging. And I kind of like that. Even in the Olympics, skateboarding still retains that little bit of chaos. Let's shake it up. Let's throw some chaos into the mix.

So, you know, I walk the line between trying to fine-tune everything and allowing skateboarding to be as chaotic and beautiful and undefinable as it always will be.