St. Petersburg, Florida - May 19, 2000
With the prelims of the X-Trials Vert competition completed, the finals set up to be a tough competition. With names like Matt Salerno, Eito Yasutoko, Shane Yost, and Sam Fogarty in the finals it had to be good.

The skaters seemed to understand that they needed to step up their performances to place well in the finals. During the two-hour break between the prelims and the finals, a sense of determination seemed to overtake the skaters who were skating in the finals. A determination to keep cool in the 95 degree heat and to work out the winning run. Looking around from the top of the ramp you could see skaters huddled together in whatever shade they could find each one of them with their eyes on the ramp, visualizing their final runs.

The time passed, the skaters made their way to the top of the ramp and the cameras started rolling, it was time to get serious.Viroel Popa, representing Jacksonville, Florida skated to 10th place with possibly the highest 540s of the day and a mute backflip. The little man from Japan, Takeshi Yasutoko, used his ability to defy gravity and fly well above our heads to skate to a third place finish behind Shane Yost in second and Eito Yasutoko in first. Shane Yost showed again why his nickname is the Tasmanian Devil, spinning everything he could. Some of Shane's tricks happen so fast and have so many variations that they are becoming extremely hard to define. Eito was able to go from a third place ranking in the prelims to the coveted first place in the finals, by linking every single trick together. Every trick flowed right into the next and the big spins like 720 flat spins both ways gave him the gold.

Rounding out the field was Javier Bujanda from Barcelona, Spain in fourth. Matt Salerno in fifth, Sven Boekhorst in sixth with a parallel grab alley-oop fishbrain across the entire ramp, Paul Malina in seventh, Carl Hills in eighth, and finally Sam Fogarty, who was battling illness in ninth.