Garda Rookie Fest 2026: 3 Wins in 48 Hours for Mattia Murroni — and a Ticket Nobody Else Got

From September 11 to 13, 2026, the Garda Rookie Fest brought the World Rookie Tour to the Go Fast Skatepark in Riva del Garda, at the northern tip of Lake Garda. The verdict on the skate side: Mattia Murroni takes the Grom contest with an 87-point run, after already winning both Best Trick sessions the day before. Three wins in 48 hours. And he walks away with something nobody else on the podium got.

The skate podium, with the scores to back it up

Sunday, official contest. Two 45-second runs per rider, only the best one counts. In the Groms, Murroni drops an 87. Behind him the gap is wide: 17 points to second, 27 to third. On the girls' side, Celeste Vassena puts down 65 points in a combined category.

• 1. Mattia Murroni87 pts

  Grom category — also won both of Saturday's Best Tricks

• 2. Mateo Hochmuth70 pts

  Grom category — qualified for the world finals in Celje

• 3. Francesco Barigazzi60 pts

  Grom category — last step on the podium, ticket to Slovenia

• 1. Celeste VassenaGirls · 65 pts

  Combined girls category — 5-0, lipslide, backside disaster, smith, feeble, backside melon, blunt fakie

The organizers never released the rest of the placings or a detailed score sheet. What's up there is exactly what's written in the official report, nothing more. No made-up fourth name to fill out the table.

87 points: what's actually in that run

Seven tricks back to back, all of them on the ramp side: backside melon, backside indy transfer, 5-0, frontside disaster, alley-oop, nollie backside disaster, backside disaster revert. Read that out loud and you can already hear the rhythm — he never puts a foot down, never drops back to flat to hunt for speed. The transfer is the moment he switches obstacles mid-air. Over 45 seconds, that's what separates 87 from 70: not a bigger trick, a run that never stops.

The detail that matters: not a single flip trick in that run. Nothing but grabs, grinds and disasters. It's an unapologetic ramp run, clean, built entirely on flow — the opposite of what the Olympic circuits reward in street right now. At the same time over in Switzerland, at the Elgg stop, the organizers didn't even put out scores: we broke down what a Rookie Fest with no score sheet looks like two days ago.

Saturday: two terrains, two Best Tricks, same winner

Before the contest, there's Saturday. Two Best Trick sessions, one on the ramp, one in the street section. Murroni wins both. On the ramp: frontside 50-50 flip out — he grinds the coping on both trucks and flips the board on the way out. In the street: kickflip down the stairs.

Those two terrains don't ask for the same skater. A ramp rider who takes stairs cleanly, or the other way around, isn't something you run into at every rookie fest. Which is exactly what makes his Sunday win a little less surprising than it looks: he'd already shown on Saturday that he was at home everywhere in the park.

BMX lands on the World Rookie Tour — and it's a first

The news that's going to get people talking as much as the scores: on Sunday, the Garda Rookie Fest hosted the very first BMX Freestyle contest in World Rookie Tour history. Same format as the skate — two 45-second runs, best one counts — and the same park.

In the Groms, Stefano Aonzo takes the win with a run packing a 360 barspin, manual, x-up and fastplant. Davide Bragagna grabs second with a crankflip and a 540 into flip fakie, Simone Borgonovo third with can-can transfer, one-foot tables and one-foot tailwhip. In the Rookies, Manuel Torello lands the tour's first-ever BMX win — 360 tuck, whip, bar-tuck, 360 whip, 180 barspin transfer, seat grab flair — ahead of Morgan Ballabio and Filippo Parisi. No actual numbers were released on the BMX side, unlike the skate.

Big Air and BMX Best Trick: who went highest

Saturday, before the contest, BMX got its own Best Trick and Big Air. Davide Bragagna takes the Grom Best Trick with a backflip to fakie — he loops it backward and rolls out fakie. Manuel Torello wins the Rookies with a 180 double barspin. On the Big Air it's Simone Borgonovo in the Groms and Gianluca Righetto in the Rookies.

Two names show up on both days: Bragagna and Torello win on Saturday, then step right back on the podium Sunday. Like Murroni on the skate side, they hold up over the whole weekend — and that's exactly what the rookie format is built to see.

Friday, nobody's counting points

The weekend didn't open with a run. On Friday, a dozen participants from Anffas Trentino — the Italian organization that supports people living with disabilities — and about fifteen riders from the Garda Rookie Camp sat down around the same table, guided by tattoo artist Nino Pasquarella. The job: draw and paint decks together.

A deck laid flat is a surface 80 centimeters by 20. Anybody can hold a marker over it. It's probably the only part of the weekend where nobody's skate level mattered at all — and that photo says it better than any ranking.

Celje, September 25-27: the ticket only Murroni is holding

Here's the ticket. Every rider who made the Riva skate podium is qualified for the World Rookie Skateboard Finals in Celje, Slovenia, September 25 to 27, 2026. A qualification is the right to show up. It doesn't pay for the drive, the room or the entry fee — and for an Italian family, Slovenia is still a 500-kilometer haul.

Murroni, though, leaves with the all-inclusive package for the finals: everything covered. That's the ticket the other two on the podium don't have. On a youth circuit where the parents' budget usually decides who makes it to the end of the season, that prize is easily worth more than the line on the results sheet. Twelve days now stand between him and Celje.

No footage from Riva has dropped from the organizers yet. This clip is from the Swiss stop, filmed by the World Rookie Tour two days before Garda: same format, same level, same vibe — you get exactly what those 45 seconds look like.

Three skate stops have gone down in the span of a few weeks: the Portugal Rookie Fest and its all-under-16 top seven, the Swiss stop in Elgg, and now Riva del Garda. Celje is about to put all of them in the same park. And if you're wondering what it feels like to win at that level at 15, we came at the question from another angle in the Sky Brown story, on an Olympic podium at 13.

An 87-point ramp run without a single flip: what would you score that line? Drop it in the comments ↓

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