FISE Birmingham 2026: Storm Wipes Out Two Finals — So Who Walked Away With the Titles?

Three days in Birmingham, Alabama. A park wedged under the concrete spans of a freeway, a handrail, a bowl, a crowd pressed up against the barriers. And on Sunday, a storm that made the call instead of the judges. The FISE World Series packed up with two BMX titles handed out without a final — and a skate contest that, for its part, went the distance. Here’s who’s leaving with what.

Skate: Hager and Ozeki Take the Titles Home

On the skate side, two verdicts. Roman Hager takes the men’s Street Pro. The American comes out of Chandler, Arizona, and FISE itself had flagged him as a name to watch before the weekend. On the women’s side, Japan’s Mei Ozeki grabs the Street Open. Two divisions, two winners, no suspense dragged out over three days: here, the skating got settled fast.

• Roman HagerStreet Pro Men

  Chandler, Arizona, USA — rides for Lakai and Erased, spotted on the US am circuit

• Mei OzekiStreet Open Women

  Japan — Japan keeps sweeping the women’s street divisions on every circuit out there

The skate rider list announced by the organizers also included Margielyn Didal from the Philippines and Réunion’s Stellio Sakellarides. Where did they end up? No way to tell — and that sentence right there, we’ll circle back to it further down, because it says a lot about where skateboarding sat in the pecking order this weekend.

Two BMX Finals Canceled: Crowned Champion Without Ever Riding the Final

On Sunday, the weather blew up the last day of competition. Organizers canceled both the men’s AND women’s BMX Freestyle Park finals. The upshot: on the men’s side, the semifinal results stand. Jacob Thiem locks in his first UCI World Cup win in front of his family and a hometown crowd, ahead of England’s Kieran Reilly and Japan’s Rimu Nakamura. On the women’s side, qualifying served as the final ranking: Miharu Ozawa on top.

• 1. Jacob ThiemWinner

  USA — first UCI World Cup win, on home soil

• 2. Kieran Reilly2nd

  England

• 3. Rimu Nakamura3rd

  Japan

In flatland, Japan swept the board. Yu Katagiri, the reigning world champion, wins the men’s ahead of fellow countryman Yu Shoji, with Canada’s Jean-William Prevost rounding out the podium. On the women’s side, it came down to tenths of a point: Chiaki Todaka takes it with 86.33 points, ahead of Karin Hommura (85.33) and Sona Yoshimura (72.67). One point between first and second. Those are published numbers — keep them in mind, the comparison is coming.

The Vibe: Concrete, a Freeway Overhead, and Air That Sticks to You

City Walk BHAM is no arena. It’s an urban park tucked under the freeway spans that cut through downtown Birmingham — concrete slabs overhead, a skatepark, a roller rink, food trucks fifty yards out. In August, Alabama wraps you in a humidity that glues the tee to your back before you’ve even stepped on a board. The sound of trucks on the rail bounces off the concrete ceiling and comes back half a second later. Spectators stand three feet from the coping, elbows on the barrier. You can hear the guys breathing between attempts. This kind of contest, you feel it in your gut before you ever see it on a screen.

What’s Really at Stake When a Festival From Montpellier Rolls Into Alabama

Here’s the thing a lot of people forget: FISE is a French machine. Born in Montpellier in the late ’90s, built up by a group based in the Hérault, it eventually exported its format — knock-down modules, bleachers, sound system, giant screen — pretty much everywhere on the planet. Birmingham 2026 is that format planted in the heart of the United States, the country that invented street skating. Safe to say, that’s one serious test to pass.

For a skater over here, what does that change? The circuit you run into every summer in Montpellier, Reims or at FISE Le Havre is the exact same product that just toured Alabama. Same brand, same modules, same judges. The level changes, not the structure. And for good measure, in 3x3, the French squad from Elancourt pushed Miami all the way to the final before folding — the Americans grabbed their ticket to the World Tour in Debrecen in the process.

So Where’s the Full Street Ranking?

Straight answer: it doesn’t exist publicly. We looked everywhere. The official FISE Birmingham page publishes zero results. The FISE press room does show an « ALL RESULTS » button — it links to a Montpellier 2023 page that never got updated. The Boardr, which has been archiving skate contest results since 2013, has nothing on file for this stop. The only identifiable, dated record comes from local TV, ABC 33/40, which names the two street winners and nothing else.

Compare: in women’s BMX flatland, we know the scores down to the hundredth. In skate street, we don’t even know who got second. That’s no communications fluke — that’s the weekend’s pecking order. In Birmingham, skateboarding played second bill behind a UCI World Cup round that comes with a mandatory official results protocol. We’ve got no other spin to sell you: Hager and Ozeki won, the rest of the ranking was never published anywhere, and NOSK8 would rather tell you that straight than make up a podium. Quite the contrast with a contest like Tampa Pro, which drops all 12 of its finalists line by line, or with the World Skate stops where every single score gets posted.

Up Next: Shanghai in October

The FISE World Series heads back to Asia: Shanghai, October 15–18, 2026, then Sakai, Japan in late November. In the meantime, the French tour rolls on — Le Havre from August 28–30, the Essonne in mid-September. If you want to see with your own eyes the format that just ran under the Birmingham overpass, no need to hop on a plane: it’s coming through three hours from home by train.

Does a title clinched in the semis count as much as one won in a final? Sound off in the comments ↓

We track every skate contest stop by stop on nosk8.com — results verified, never copy-pasted.

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