Mystic Cup 25th Anniversary, June 2019

Twenty-five years is a long time for a skate contest to run.

In skating terms, it represents many generations of batons passed along.

The Mystic Cup started life as an extension of the European professional contest circuit which was the basis of many a ‘Summer In Europe’ issue of 411 Video Magazine in its heyday, and a vital part of the culture as a result.

 All those other events - in Lausanne, in Dortmund, in Northampton and Marseille - have passed into the annals of history while the Mystic Cup has endured floods and financial crises to become a fixed star on Prague’s summer social calendar.

 The weekend of 2019’s Mystic Cup found the city slap-bang in the centre of a continental heatwave that created its own challenges.

Dotted around the walkways between the clubhouse and the rest of the site a makeshift sprinkler system puffed out glorious clouds of mist that punters would pause within as if the Rapture had arrived, all weekend long. 

So, a scorcher on that front.

Prague is also home to an amazing skateboarding scene and the city is rightly famous for its bohemian lifestyle and mellow ambience which was much on display over the course of the weekend.

The women’s contest continues to be one of the big stories of this event and has by now become a vital part of the weekend mix. The men’s street contest had that great Mystic quality of the crowd favouring locals like Tomáš Stejskal and outliers like Andy Anderson equally, but in truth the weekend belonged to the prodigious skating talent that is Peru’s Angelo Caro.

Gone is the shy teenager first seen at Red Bull Skate Arcade in Lisbon in 2015, and in his place we saw a man with the crowd in the palm of his hand who barely missed a trick all weekend. 

Unsurprisingly, he exited on Sunday night with both the Men’s Street and Best Trick titles in his shoulder bag. Then he came back the next day to help with the clear-up. 

All round, a class act and a bright future beckons.

With Denmark’s perennial stalwart of the event Dannie Carlsen bringing home the bacon in Bowl  alongside France’s Jeromine Louvet for the girls and Russia’s Ksenia Maricheva doing likewise in the Women’s Street contest, nothing remained but the nightlife as the temperatures mercifully began to drop at the end of an always fast - and occasionally dangerous - weekend.