BTS: Four Down of the Year '24
George Phillips on the gnarest nod in skating
It’s the end, and Reuben Barrack is the choice and the champ.
A fucking hefty hammer of a kickflip wallride — over a handrail, no less; frontside, no less — was voted Four Down of the Year (hereafter FOTY) by a jury of his peers. And a worthy winner it was! Flicked and pressed like Clay’s spirit against a battleship-looking hubba at Norte Vista High, shot off the bow practically into the street, a classic California red curb rolled out like the proverbial carpet before him, almost like it was meant to be.
But getting through was a war, a real knife fight of a bracket that was damn near impossible to determine at some points, as undying polls and scalpel-thin margins made for drama.
‘It’s exciting, but it’s a little bit nerve-racking,’ Four Down founder, contest clip curator, previous 4ts interview subject, and ripper George Phillips says.
This is the third edition of FOTY, Barrack joining the previous winners T-Funk and Brooks Shuping, who took the titles with a frontside ollie over the big bench at Chinatown Banks and an absolutely bonkers convenience store wallride in Louisville, respectively. Phillips is for the most part the sole engine behind the thing, selecting the tricks, cutting together the hype vid, and setting up the bracket.
Phillips collect the clips all year, saving them to a folder as he comes across them. The windows’s simple as death, by the way: 12:00am January 1st to 11:59pm December 31st. He limits them to one per skater — because otherwise it’s gonna be nothing by Ryan Reyes mirror matches — and strives for both the ‘best’ of what they’ve done and an overall mix of tricks.
‘When I get to the end of the year, I’ll probably have like 40 or so in there’ that are then trimmed down, Phillips says. ‘I just kind of A/B test it on myself, like, ok: is this one better than that one?’
Once he triages down to about 20 of the true contenders, the process gets more difficult. ‘I had to really kind of fight for like, which of these four do I have to remove?’
The final 16 get plugged into a bracket and then randomized; there’s no seeding here, bc how the fuck would one even do that, anyway? Each matchup is carried out over Reels, where the community votes by the hundreds. The merits of banks vs vertical walls, hand drags and hating and hero cults, and even the existential question of what makes a four down, exactly? are discussed in the comments, and after a roughly 24 hour window – morning coffee to morning coffee – the people’s winner moves on.
Well, usually.
Here’s the thing about those polls that we didn’t know: the fuckers don’t close. Which means that choosing a winner when things are tight could come down to a difference of 7 votes and whatever second you happen to look and see. That’s what happened between T4 and Joseph Campos. The semifinal matchup pitted Campos’ enormous backside kickflip into a behemoth of a bank against T4’s difficult-to-even-fucking-describe-dude gap out to 5-0 to, like, a stab of a frontside roll-in. Two fabulous moves that were dope for different reasons — and the voting bore it out.
As the votes came in, neither contender could open a definitive gap on the other, flitting between 49/51% like a drunken hummingbird. He knew that people would be bummed either way it broke, which definitely sucks. But when Phillips took the question of a tiebreaker to the people it — ironically enough — came back tied. Eventually, he just made the call: tiebreaker.
It was difficult finding comparable clips, Phillips says, as he’s at the Mercy of the Content, what came out in the calendar year; in the end, T4’s backtail to 180 out on China Banks and Campos’ bs wallride down a big ol’ set represented kind of a reversal of their original entries, and Campos moved on before getting knocked out in the championship round. (He did lock down the least prestigious award in skating, though.)
‘The 51 to 49 thing was really hard for me, because I saw it flip-flop all day,’ Phillips says. ‘And a lot of people only saw it at one point in time. So I’d have people in the comments like it’s 51 for Campos, he gets it! and other people would be like it’s 51 for T4, he gets it. And then when I did the tiebreaker, people were like justice for T4! This is bullshit!,’ he laughs. ‘Like, aw man, I can’t win.’
But Reuben eventually did, and tough ties aside, the passion from the community and the winner’s reaction were well worth it.
‘He’s been chatting with me the whole time,’ Phillips says.
‘It’s nice when the person that wins is involved and hyped.’
