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.
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.”
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.
“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’.