Watching a Kilian Martin skate video is akin to witnessing Michael Jordan fly through space to dunk a basketball for the first time. It is poetry in motion, and hard evidence of an athlet near the peak of his creative and physical powers. But Kilian wasn’t always a skateboarder. When hewas 10 years old, he joined a gymnastics school in Madrid, Spain. At this same time, he also found a passion for surfing, however, with the ocean over 6 hours away, being able to practice everyday was a near impossibility. Surrounded by cement and asphalt, he realized he could take up skateboarding to help his surfing abilities. So, at the age of 16, he started to skate Mini-Ramps and Street. After a year of skateboarding, Kilian Martin discovered Freestyle Skateboarding after watching Powell Peralta’s Ban This skate video. He then realized that this style of skateboarding would allow him to utilize his gymnastics abilities but more importantly, expand his outlet of creativity. When he turned 21, he decided to visit California, where he set out on a journey to master his skateboarding abilities. Kilian grabbed many of his freestyle tricks and adapted them to street skateboarding.
Since then, he has developed his own unique style, and a level of technicality that has set him in a class of his very own bringing all that he learned as a young gymnast and combining it with the last thirty years of street and freestyle skateboarding. The result is an homage to the form itself – from skating’s early acrobatic days in the 60s to the street innovations of the 90s. Criticised at times by other skaters for his cross-disciplinary and dance-like style, invariably stays true to his own principles. “When I skate, there is just me and my board. I couldn’t care less about pre-defined categories and styles. It is only skateboarding – and I do what I enjoy.“ As captured in his videos, Kilian takes freestyle skateboarding into the twenty-first century with his artful and inspiring take on handstands, helipops, and heel flips.