Skaters break and battle the stage for a jam skate beach showdown title at Jackalope Fest ’26
d. calder
Jackalope Festival 2026 was a full three-day weekend where the worlds of extreme sports converged. Elite athletes literally dropped in from all over the globe to the Virginia Beach oceanfront. X Games winners. ESPN decorated competitors. Local underdogs and pro-level talent across many disciplines of riding…[roller skates, rollerblades, skateboards, scooters, motocross bikes, BMX bikes]…a wave. The lineup was unlike anything you'd expect to find across a stretch of sand and boardwalk. Freestyle motocross riders launched off ramps built directly on the beach. BMX athletes and Pro Skateboarders ran demos showcasing their tricks. Skateboarders as young as five or six years old shredded 14-foot half pipes effortlessly in high wind conditions. Aggressive inline and quad skaters competed in both street and jam style competitions. While looking up to see a kid catching big air on the vert ramp you may have spotted a highliner balancing a slackline hoisted between two oceanfront hotels suspended over open air. If you stepped down to the water you might have caught the skimboard competition. Just when you thought you'd seen everything, timber sports is firing up chainsaws nearby.
Between the action, there was art to take in, local food trucks, and mini open skate parks built specifically for the event. So if competing isn’t your thing but wanted to hit a few tricks or catch a lil air, @keenramps sponsored collection of obstacles that any rider could try (with a signed waiver of course).
I was highly inspired by Imoh Ekasi-Otu (@sk8bdhomi), a pro skateboarder who founded Shape Foundation. The 501(c)(3) organization helps make skateboarding accessible to children in Nigeria. We heard he was going to be shredding Rome in the next few weeks, wishing homie the best of luck! KickPush Org had a super cool adaptive skate demo, brought to us by WCMX world champion and Paralympic skater Edward Jeffries (@e_sosask8). The showcase displayed how inclusive and limitless adaptive skating can be. KickPush sponsored adaptive skaters to travel to Jackalope and has the ultimate goal of getting adaptive skateboarding to the Paralympics. We need our grassroots initiatives to remain interconnected and protected in order to grow in the right direction. These orgs definitely got the vision right!
@KarmaSkate hosted a freestyle / jam skate competition to showcase athletes with rhythm and advanced dance moves, on rollerskates. Though I am skilled in many disciplines of skating, rhythm is where I have spent my 10,000 hours. I entered the contest prepared to show out, enjoy myself, and level up with some of the best skaters around. The competition was MC’d by jam skate legend, @smittyonskates. The contest was judged on crowd work, technicality, musicality, ground work. 1st place winner, (@hipnoticwun) took home the $1000 cash prize on his birthday, 2nd place winner (@iskate_94) took the $500 cash prize, 3rd place winner (@e_stanita) took home a $250 gift card to Karma Skate shop, and 4th place winner (@exoticsk8tr) took home a $100 gift card to Karma Skate shop. The amount of talent on that stage was incredibly creative, innovative, and highly athletic. Flips, somersaults, jumps, spins, b-boy dancing, headstand FREEZES? You get what I’m saying here?
This isn’t your normal lap around the skating rink.
Jackalope and Karma Skate shop provided us with a platform to elevate the natural athleticism that develops and remains in silo. Competition forces elevation in the naturally existing talent. Unfortunately outside of jam skating competitions, there isn’t much organization to our sport for my fellow “rink rats”. In fact, many just consider rollerskating a hobby. Jam skating is just as niche as rhythm skating, but they are so different in art they really deserve their own venues. We’ve learned to incorporate dance, incredible balance, ridiculous amounts of swag, and flow into a set of skates, often in tandem. Respected “styles” of rhythm emerging from areas regionally across the globe. Just Google “rollerskating in [insert major city]” you will see patterns and variations of dance moves, skate style, and skate hardware.
For those dedicated to the sport rollerskating: many of our technical skills are built during our darkest moments, forcing us to bloom into the brightest shining athletes who have pushed through injuries, depression, and hardships on skates just to feel alive again. Personally, I feel that deserves more than just likes and reposts. I walked away from Jackalope genuinely inspired. Artistically. Athletically. If you don’t see how one ties into the other, then you’ll never appreciate how we got here. The talent has always existed. The question is whether the world gets to see it? I’ve been skating for almost 30 years. Since 2016, I’ve been hyper-focused on rhythm skating at the rink and our biggest drawback is the lack of an organized platform. I don’t mean just a link to a social media page that likely won’t exist when the hype dies down. I mean something that actually keeps the community going and growing.
This weekend showed me we have to keep building and bridging. Our niche sport communities deserve to grow and live beyond the death of the damn algorithm.
WELCOME TO ROLL’D MAG.
article: dominique calder, roll’d co-founder
media: storm calder, roll’d co-founder
access: karma26
