Sign Up for Rewards
Order By 6pm For Next Day Delivery*
Sign Up for Rewards
Order By 6pm For Next Day Delivery*
Sign Up for Rewards
Order By 6pm For Next Day Delivery*
Aus
  • Latest
  • Skate Shoes
  • Launches
  • CHRISTMAS
  • Find Your Local Skate Shop
  • About Us
  • Blog
  • Route One Clothing

  • Select country

    Aus

A Year in Review

A Year in Review
A Year in Review
Dec 2025 by Route One
For over a decade now, we’ve ended the year with a retrospective look back at the previous twelve months, but never once have arguably the three greatest parts dropped the week before.
If we were inclined to be lazy, we’d just link you to last Thursday’s musings and sign off with a well-deserved mince pie, wishing you and yours good tidings for the festive period and all the best for 2026.
But we’re not inclined to be lazy! So, we took a long, hard look at the great and the good of the past year and we’re sharing three of our favourite clips below. They might not be award winners, but they’re videos that really stood out for us and, in something as subjective as skateboarding, that’s all we can really do!
First off, and please forgive the self indulgence, the highlight of our year had to be when Girl called us up, asking if we fancied catching up with Mike Carroll


Few people can lay claim to as continuous an influence on skateboarding as this man, and even the mention of his name was enough to turn us into the fawning teenage fans we’ve always remained at heart.
At the vanguard of the street revolution coming out of SF in the late 1980s, through epoch-defining parts in the seminal Plan B videos Questionable and Virtual Reality, the formation of Girl in 1993, SOTY in ’94, launching Lakai in 1999, and then casually dropping the greatest line of all time in Transworld’s Modus Operandi—we don’t even have to mention Yeah Right! or Fully Flared for you to know his is a career of unparalleled success.
Sitting down for a couple of hours in our London store, a mere three days before his 50th birthday, we discussed family, filming, and Owen Wilson’s comedic fortitude. Click that play button to remind yourself what Mike had to say!

Regular readers of our twice-monthly musings will be well aware of our love affair with all things Jante. Fritte Söderström’s numerically titled, Sour-centric series of videos excites us like little else and, in the absence of Sour Solution IV, it serves as our opportunity to get our Gustav fix, as well as reminding us that skateboarding is still the coolest thing in the world.


But there’s a lot more to Jante than just Gustav Tønnesen, and Fritte reminded us of that back in June, dropping three years of Filip Almqvist’s most aesthetically pleasing skateboarding in one 12-minute package.
Think Rough Cut, but with the smoothest filming imaginable (not sure “Smooth Cut” would work as a title - Ed). It’s raw footage that beautifully illustrates the symbiotic relationship between a good filmer and his muse. If you’re an aspiring skate videographer and want to move beyond TikToks of your mates slamming down the local Aldi kerbs, you could do a lot worse than study this as though it were your bible. For the rest of us, though? We just took the opportunity to watch some seriously good skateboarding!

Unlike the Jante boys or the likes of Mike Carroll, Skateboarding is hard for most of us - we reckon that's something we can all agree on. There might not be much that connects the human race on a superficial level these days but skateboarding being really difficult is a universally held perspective, shared across the generations!


Except that, for a tiny minority of people, folk like Jaakko Ojanen, skateboarding might actually be really easy. Don't ask us how; if we knew the secret we'd be out nollie noseblunting Clipper, not entertaining you with this irrelevant nonsense. But the evidence suggests, certainly as far as his video output is concerned, that Element Skateboards' Jaakko finds skateboarding a doddle.

Take this part from back in March. Little of it makes sense; as a collection of unrelated stunts it truly is spectacular. Never resting in one avenue of manoeuvre possibility, Tampere native Jaakko is able to manipulate his board any way he wants and seemingly on any obstacle he comes across.

Or maybe it's all AI and skateboarding is still really hard. It certainly felt that way for us throughout 2025!
Previous post
Joslin, Gabbers and Schaar: the First Ever Three Way Tie for SOTY?

Your Bag 0

Your bag is currently empty.
Continue shopping