Jaakko Ojanen – It’s Better?
Words by Max Olijnyk
“There are a few skaters you need to see in real life to see the magic: he’s one of them. He’s special. There’s only a few like him, it’s crazy. Like yesterday he did some really fucked-up shit. I was just like, how?” says Phil Zwijsen, who has been around the Jaakko magic for over a decade now at Element; first as a teammate and now as team manager and friend.
Along with other big-brained peers such as Gustav Tønnesen, Ishod Wair and Mark Suciu (and with a nod to the originators – Gonz, Blender et.al), Jaakko Ojanen manages to combine every adjective we use to categorise skateboarding (technical, stylish, gnarly…), but with an inventive, playful approach underpinning the whole thing.
Crooked grind pop-out, Paris. Ph. Clément Le Gall
When I spoke to Jaakko in February, he was nearing the end of a quick rest-stop at home in Tampere, Finland before heading off on another filming trip. After a slightly quiet couple of years following the mass-exodus from the DC team, 2025 is looking pretty busy for the 30-year-old, with two parts in the works for Element and Asics. He credits joining the Asics squad with igniting “a new spark,” but says he was in no rush to find a new shoe sponsor.
“I didn’t really care; I was kinda glad it (DC) was over in a sense. It had been so long skating in the same shoes. I didn’t want to stress about it; I wanted to turn it into a positive thing. I talked to Kaspar about getting on Asics for almost a year, we took it pretty slowly. I didn’t want to stress about it and go somewhere I didn’t feel comfortable or happy with, so I took my time. It worked, I’m happy.”
Nollie shove-it to fakie 5-0 (yep fakie 5-0!), Paris. Ph. Clément Le Gall
Kaspar is Kaspar Van Lierop, a Dutch ex-pro skater turned industry insider who now lives in Portland, Oregon. After a long stint at Nike, Kaspar started his own skate consultancy service, KVL Connect, which functions as a sort of medium between mainstream brands who want to get involved with skate-boarding (his client list includes Off White, HBO and StockX, to name a few), to ensure the relationship is mutually beneficial and avoids the dreaded ‘greetings, fellow kids’ effect.
KVL Connect started working with Asics in 2022 after the brand had already launched a skateboarding division in Japan. Spotting potential, Kaspar approached the brand and began working on market research, product feed-back and some strategy for what the skate team could look like. Together with creative director Jake Gascoyne, he began recruiting a team ahead of the brand’s global launch in 2023. Two years on, aided by an eclectic squad, some strange ads (and fittingly strange videos by Jacob Harris), Asics has slotted into the landscape quite nicely. Jaakko is the most recent addition to the team.
Backside nosegrind pop-out, Paris. Ph. Clément Le Gall
“My whole thing with Asics was: let’s look for skaters who are different. You have an Akwasi, you have an Emile… there’s no one like them, they’re so unique. Same for Jaakko. I’ve been seeing him skate for a long time and when a guy like that has no shoe deal, I’m like wait a minute, you know?” says Kaspar.
“I don’t want to label him as ‘well-rounded’ or a ‘creative skater’ because these days there’s a lot of those. To me he’s more unexpected. He’s not a gimmicky skater who always tries to do something forcefully that people will trip out on.”
The photos that accompany this article are mostly derived from a trip to Paris, with a short detour through Berlin. True to form, there’s something awkward, obscure or surprising about every trick – he’s sliding across the middle of an electrical box, his board is broken, it was raining, there’s a pole in the way. Jaakko’s favourite of the selection is a 360 flip shot in Paris, which upon first glance is relatively ‘normal’.
360 flip, Paris. Ph. Clément Le Gall
“I never really break my boards, especially on the nose, but it just snapped on one of the tries. Then I was like, ‘I want to do it with this board.’ It was kinda a hectic spot with a lot of traffic and shit, so I was in this weird state where I was just trying. It was pretty fun, though. I don’t know if you see the broken board in the clip. I think I did it twice – once before I broke the board and one after. It’s pretty cool; I like that.”
This is an insight into what motivates Jaakko – and a good reminder of how different his experience is to the rest of us mere mortals (though, in my case, you could compare osteoarthritis to a broken board) – it’s the factors out of his control that makes things interesting.
“It’s been so long that I’ve skated like this, kind of looking for spots, that it’s expanded a bit now. I see different things, some things that are not there right away. Sometimes they need a little bit of something to make it work; it’s not a perfect spot right away, it’s not even a spot right away. But you can make it a spot, you can open it up.”
Backside nosebluntslide, Berlin. Ph. Joel Peck
In terms of what to expect from the new parts, his TM is confident this could be some of Jaakko’s best work.
“The way he skates has evolved; he’s on the best of it now,” says Phil. “He may not think that, because before he was jumping and stuff, but I think he really found his way of skating now – which is maybe less impact but more impactful.”
On his own behalf, Jaakko is excited to have a full year of travel ahead of him, including two of his favourite destinations in Japan and New York. But in terms of a trick or spot list, he prefers not to plan ahead.
“I can’t really think of a spot and be like, ‘I’m going to do this there’, it doesn’t work like that for me. Usually the best thing comes if I just go skating. Not everything works but most of the time you get the idea at the spot. You have to skate it for a little bit and then you have this idea; that’s how it works for me the best.”
“For Jaakko, we just go to spots and let his mind go,” Phil continues. “That’s the best way for him. If I could skate like anyone it would be him or Eetu (Toropainen) because they’re both so spontaneous. It’s not about tricks because they can do them all, that’s the thing. It’s not about the trick, it’s about – my board can go like this or go like this – it’s so fascinating to watch him skate.”
Ph. Alex Papke
