Sarasota skateboarder lands in global top-15 rankings

For Jake Ilardi, the most surreal moment of the Red Bull Roller Coaster event in Munich on June 23 wasn’t the event itself.

It was later, when the Sarasota native joined fellow skateboarder Pedro Barros, of Brazil, for a beer. Ilardi, 21, had watched Barros, 23, and his videos for years, he said. Now Ilardi was competing and “chilling” alongside him, and Ilardi felt at home in that world.

Perhaps it was Barros who should have been star-struck. After all, Ilardi scored a 95 and won the Roller Coaster event, which features a 300-meter slopestyle ramp with street, bowl and megaramp elements. It was the most recent instance of Ilardi showing his star potential, but not the first.

Ilardi is ranked 14th-best in the world by The Boardr, a top skateboard organization which puts on events like the Vans Park Series and holds a seat on the board of World Skate (the sport’s governing body). He wasn’t on the global radar 18 months ago. Back then, he worked at Publix as a source of income while taking part in local competitions and occasionally traveling out of state to skate.

Then he got a chance to skate in Montreal’s “Am Getting Paid” event in September 2017, and everything changed. He won, hitting a "540" and a "big flight front board" in the same run. He took home $10,000 from that event, and for the first time his dream of making a living off skateboarding seemed within reach. He’s in the “transitional” stage now, he said, but he’s made enough off skateboarding (The Boardr has his 2018 earnings at $60,750) to move to Los Angeles, which he did in March. That’s skating Mecca, he said, and as much as he thanks Sarasota for all it's done for him, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to head west.

Ilardi has wanted a pro skateboarding career since he was 4, when his grandmother, Paulette Moulton, bought him and his twin brother Nate Ilardi their first skateboards. They pushed those around for four years, doing tricks off the half-pipe their family built them. When the boys turned 8, they bought their first “real” boards at Compound Boardshop in Osprey and conquered the bowls of Payne Park. Eventually, Nate moved more into the skate photography realm, and now runs his own business, Ilardi Media, but Jake never got off the board.

“It’s all I wanted to do,” Jake said. “I would watch the C1RCA (Footwear) video compilations of pros and then just skate, skate, skate. All the hard working is paying off.”

It’s been an explosion of popularity for Ilardi since the Montreal event. His social media presence has ballooned from 5,828 Instagram followers on Sept. 30, 2017, to 16,410. A video uploaded to YouTube on June 12 by skateboarding site The Berrics titled “Jake Ilardi - Where The (expletive) Did This Guy Come From?!” has approximately 43,000 views. He’s using his platform for more than just self-promotion. Ilardi wants people to know that the general perception of skaters is wrong.

“We’re stereotyped,” Ilardi said. “People think we’re bad and we vandalize things, do drugs, etc. That’s not the case. A few bad apples ruin it for everyone.”

Skateboarding will be featured in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and Ilardi said it would be “an honor” to represent his country at the event. It’s the sport’s debut at the biggest sporting event on Earth, and Ilardi knows how important this first go-round will be for its hopes of becoming a fixture. There are eight Americans ahead of him on The Boardr’s global rankings. If he qualifies well through the Street League, he has a real shot to make it.

Honor aside, it would also be a continuation of Ilardi’s favorite thing about his life: Traveling the world, skating with his “homies.” Ilardi isn’t a pro, or even an “amateur” yet (in terms of sponsorships), but he’s on his way. No matter what happens, he’ll be fine. When Ilardi in on his board, he’s living his best life.

“As long as I’m still skating, I’m happy,” Ilardi said.