COS Cup Torgau | German Skateboarding Championships 2024

Oops, have we already anticipated too much? Does no one want to read on now? Let's hope not, after all there were far more notable things in Torgau than Josh's win. As mentioned at the beginning, Torgau is located in Saxony, roughly between Cottbus and Leipzig. Some people were of the opinion beforehand that there were a lot of people with questionable political views in this area and that this could “influence” the contest in some way. To cut a long story short, this was in no way the case. No (at least visible) strange-looking people were to be seen, neither at the contest nor in the streets of the historic old town. With the castle, the bears in the moat and very high-quality restaurants, it was almost an attraction in itself. Nevertheless, we were of course primarily interested in the contest and, above all, the weather, which didn't look too good.

After it had rained all day on Friday, the clouds were fortunately kind to us on Saturday and the sun even came out during the course of the day. In 2024, the procedure for the Elemination is that all riders from all groups will be lumped together to form the heats. This means that a Men-Pro rider can follow a Flinta-Amateuer rider. Pretty simple, but it still takes some getting used to. The whole thing is then converted to the corresponding groups by computer mastermind David Suhari and this is how the results of Saturday were created. It was great that Bartosz Cisielski, a true street icon from the deepest west of Germany, had found his way to Saxony to enrich the Ü-35 group with other homies. It's always great to see what routes the old hands still take on!

The same applies to some of the B-group starters, for whom there is also Mad Respect at this point and travel from the Ruhrpott! In the end, there were 5 heats on Saturday and due to the “mix”, it remained exciting until the end as to who had made it into Sunday's semi-final or final. The bottom line is: everyone who deserved it. Henry Alberts stood out in the amateur division and one can confidently ask why the man from Lingen doesn't actually have a sponsor. In the Street Pro division, Josh Junkes qualified in first place with a flawless run, which meant he went straight into the final. So far, so good and off we went back to the hostel for a round of “SOS Monkey Alarm”, the party game of our choice this weekend. After-show parties are simply out in 2024 and there certainly wouldn't have been much going on at one in Torgau.

Sunday's final day got off to a fantastic start, weather-wise. As the forecast for this weekend was anything but glorious, we were particularly pleased with the bright blue sky. The practice sessions started enthusiastically at around 11 a.m. and all the starters were highly motivated, especially in the glorious sunshine. Only the rather strong wind made things difficult for some, but the bottom line is that the conditions were the same for everyone. The semi-finals of the Street Pro division took place first, in which Josh did not have to compete. Mika Möller had only just qualified, but had a better day on Sunday and ended up in 1st place (of the semi-finalists). This was followed by the finals of the amateur divisions, then the over-35 finalists got their turn and during all these runs the sky suddenly closed in menacingly. And so, at the end of these runs, the dreaded rain suddenly came and ensured that the finals of the Pro Divisions literally fell through. This was extremely frustrating on the one hand, but on the other something very heart-warming happened: The guys split the prize money fairly among all the finalists (Josh Junkes got a few more euros as the winner). That was really great to see and underlines how well the skateboarders who always turn up at the COS Cups and liven up the series get on with each other. All that remains is to thank the entire COS Cup team, especially Steffen Krüger, who managed to put on at least one event in 2024 despite all kinds of hardships. Let's hope that there will be a real series again in 2025. Then we'll all see each other again, I promise!