Japanese street skater Sora Shirai has put the Street League Skateboarding circuit on notice with a 9.8-scored cavalerial sugarcane to switch-regular combination during a qualifier round, a trick the broadcast team immediately flagged as "on par for some of the highest scores in Street League history."
The move itself is one of the most technical sequences ever attempted at an SLS event. Shirai launched into a cavalerial � a nearly full 270-degree rotation � before stomping into a sugarcane grind, then ripped the opposite way 180 degrees out of the feature. Commentators visibly struggled to keep up with the breakdown in real time.
"I'm a full 270, almost a 360 rotation before he lands into that sugarcane and then rips it all the way back 180 from that," one analyst said on air, pausing on the slow-motion replay. "That is so incredibly difficult."
The judges rewarded Shirai with a 9.8, lifting his overall run score to 27.7 at the qualifier stage. The number carries particular weight in Street League's scoring system, where tenths of a point routinely separate final podiums and the qualifier pool is traditionally where the best tricks get burned off the deck before final runs even begin.
"If that's not a nine, I'm going to go down and see the judges myself," a commentator joked during the replay. "That was a gnarly trick."
Shirai's run is the latest chapter in what the broadcast team openly described as a Japanese takeover of the men's SLS draw. The roster of Japanese skaters now dropping nine-plus scores has widened markedly from the wave that first broke through around Tokyo 2020, with a new generation taking advantage of the wildcard and qualifier pathways to force their way into finals.
"That is on par for some of the highest scores in Street League history," the lead commentator said after Shirai's run. "And this is the qualifier, but that's what it takes. That is the level of trick that we're looking for. That is the tech in the N."
Street League's scoring model rewards difficulty, consistency across a run, and execution on the landing and roll-away. A cavalerial sugarcane that exits back to regular satisfies every column on the judges' rubric simultaneously � heavy rotation in, a grind that demands balance and weight shift, and a technical spin-out that adds directional difficulty.
For Shirai personally, the 27.7 posts a strong foundation heading into the later qualifying rounds. SLS events generally carry the top qualifying scores through as a buffer, meaning a single run of this calibre can effectively lock a skater into the next-round pool without needing to take further risks until the finals draw is set.
What makes the scoreline more remarkable is the company Shirai is keeping. Teammates and rivals Yuto Horigome, Toa Sasaki, Ginwoo Onodera and Kyrie Netsuki have all dropped nine-plus scores during the same qualifying window, producing what may be the deepest Japanese contingent in SLS history.
The qualifier performance also reinforces why scouting departments on skate brands have been quietly resetting roster priorities around the Japanese pipeline. With SLS scoring standards rising and runs like Shirai's resetting what's possible, the qualifier is no longer the warm-up act � it's the main event.
