Mark Suciu, 2021 SOTY: the skater who reads Keats between lines

Verso - 2019: five minutes that shut everybody up

May 2019. Habitat drops Verso. Five minutes filmed by Justin Albert. No effects, no cheesy slow-mo, no filler face shots. Just Suciu, lines that keep going, and combos you read back like sentences.

Seven years later, 17-year-old kids who weren’t even born when Yeah Right came out watch it on loop. The older heads have known for a long time: no street part since Photosynthesis had set that bar for writing. Suciu strings together switch backside tailslide, frontside crooked across 25 meters of marble, nollie heelflip in the same line. Not separate tricks. One full sentence.

Notice what nobody points out? No pointless rail bash. No gap-to-grind screamed out for the likes. Dude builds meaning trick by trick. That’s rare. In the 2026 climate, it’s almost suspicious.

Pro at 20, student at 23: his Philly turn

Born August 3, 1992 in Saratoga, California. Romanian roots on the family side. Pro as a teenager, fully sponsored before 20. The script was already written: he should have stacked contests and bangers for ten years, then vanished.

He does the opposite. At 23 he enrolls at Temple University in Philadelphia. Bachelor of Arts in English literature. No rigged « skate-and-study » deal. Regular program. Real school, real classes — Shakespeare, English lit. Four years, degree in hand, without ever putting the board down.

During those Philly years, he films a big chunk of Verso. You read Keats in the morning, you skate lines at the redeveloped Love Park at night. How many pros can hold both and stay at a pro level? Honest answer: one. Him.

He told the story himself on the Nine Club: college taught him how to build an argument. He imported that structure straight into his parts. A trick is a thesis. A line is the proof. The last clip is the conclusion. That’s why watching Verso feels like watching something get built, move forward, and land somewhere.

Three days on the same ledge: his method is obsession

There are two ways to attack a spot. Either you spot the obvious trick, land it in two hours and move on. That’s what 90% of pros do. Or you stay. Three days on the same ledge, trying lines that don’t exist yet. That’s Suciu.

The obsessive side, he lifted it from the way he reads. Being willing to sit in doubt for a long time, just to see what comes out of it. Not going for the easy answer. Holding on until something new shows up.

You can see the result in Verso: combos nobody had imagined on those spots.

Put that next to how Suciu attacks a spot. Normal pros roll up, ID the banger, land it in two hours, move on. He stays on the same ledge for three days to find the line that didn’t exist. He accepts the uncertainty. He holds the tension. He walks away with something nobody would have pictured.

« Negative capability when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. » Keep that one in your back pocket. It’s not just intellectual posturing. It’s exactly what you’re watching in Verso: a guy who refuses the easy way out of the already-done trick, and digs until the right combo shows up.

2021 SOTY: a trophy won with no contest, no judges

December 2021. Thrasher announces SOTY. It’s Suciu. Nobody was really surprised. The year had been monstrous: two full parts, including the Thrasher cover, impossible spots, surgical consistency.

But here’s the part worth stopping on. Suciu has never skated a pro contest. Not one SLS. Not one Tampa Pro. SOTY is the exact opposite of the Olympic circuit. Thrasher’s editor-in-chief decides, period. And he decided that in 2021, the skater of the year was a guy chasing a certain idea of the trick instead of the judges.

Four years on, it still reads as a message. While the race for the LA28 Olympics fires back up in June 2026, the 2021 SOTY is a reminder that another yardstick exists. The one where you judge the depth of a part, not the score across eight 45-second runs.

Habitat, Thunder, Spitfire, Gazelle ADV: his setup, as is

Suciu has been riding for Habitat Skateboards since he was a teenager. The brand founded by Joe Castrucci and Mike Hill, Alien Workshop’s street arm, in the same arty lane he claims. Thunder trucks, Spitfire Formula Four wheels, Jessup grip. All classic. Zero gimmick.

Shoe-wise it’s the Adidas Gazelle ADV, his pro model. The Gazelle is the same silhouette you were wearing in 1998 — Adidas just rebuilt it for skating. Suciu didn’t want a flashy shoe. He wanted something low-key, durable, that doesn’t shout its own name on every ollie. It tracks with everything else.

Full fit: buttoned-up RVCA shirt, straight-cut pants, sometimes a cap. No hyped streetwear. Basically a lit-major dress code. And that’s exactly the point — when you watch a clip of him, your eyes never go to the outfit. They stay on the line. Everything else is in service of the trick.

Daewon, Koston, Suciu: the lineage of cerebral skaters

If you’re looking for the family tree, Suciu comes down from Daewon Song for technical creativity and Eric Koston for ledge precision. But he pushes it further: he thinks about his skating — not just his own, a whole era’s. He’s the kid who would have grown up watching Alien Workshop’s Photosynthesis in 2000 and figured you could skate the way you write a sentence.

One last detail you’ll like. Suciu still reads, a lot, and he writes. He has a personal site — marksuciu.bio — where he drops short texts, micro-essays, photos. One line on there reads like a manifesto: « the urgency of the trick is to do it before you’ve figured out why ». That one’s worth a few reads.

Which moment from Mark Suciu’s Verso – 2019 part stuck with you? Drop the line you keep rewinding. Tell us in the comments ↓