Fingerboard World Championship
Before the World Title: The Early Fast Fingers Years (2000–2007)
Fast Fingers emerged around the 1999/2000 Blackriver era — official sources identify Fast Fingers 1 in 2000 — years before the contest became an official world championship in 2008.
Research status
Champion details are held until official, trophy, or primary sources agree.
Before the podium photos and the world-champion roll, Fast Fingers was a shop contest. It grew out of Blackriver's earliest years in Germany — hand-built ramps, a tiny scene, and skaters bringing full-size contest energy to a miniature world. The early-year record is genuinely incomplete, so this entry is grouped, research-first context rather than a list of results.
Part of the Fast Fingers Archive
- Year
- 2000
- Edition
- —
- Format
- Live event
- Location
- Germany (Blackriver)
The contest
What happened
Official sources place the birth of the event tradition around the 1999/2000 Blackriver era, with Fast Fingers 1 held in 2000 and the first dedicated fingerboard park opening the same year. The first official Fingerboard World Championship is identified as 2008 (Fast Fingers 11). Before that, the early editions ran as scene contests: a community retrospective, cross-checked against the engraved event trophy plaques, lists Christian 'ÜLHT' Gläßel as the FF1 (2000) winner (and a later multi-win champion), Chris 'Mad' Heck taking FF2, Boris 'D-Rex' Dietschi on a three-peat around FF4 (held 20 April 2002) through FF6, and the future world champions Elias Assmuth (FF7, 2004; FF10, 2007) and Dimitri Schlotthauer (FF8, 2005; FF9) already winning in this period. These early names are community/trophy-plaque evidence rather than an official results page, so they are surfaced here as cautious context, not asserted as confirmed records.1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
The gear
Gear & setup trends
These years sit in the early boutique / wood-deck era: hand-pressed wooden decks were narrower than today's norms, and dedicated trucks and urethane wheels had not yet arrived, so hardware lagged behind deck and ramp quality.
The scene
Brands & scene
Blackriver (founded 1999) built the ramps and the event; Berlinwood (2002) brought early wooden decks; and the Austrian Fingaspeak scene in Steyr was an early hub. Trading happened on community forums rather than any dedicated marketplace.
The mood
The zeitgeist
Small-scene energy: shop roots, hand-built ramps, scanned flyers, raw event-table photos, and early-web/forum culture.
Today
Reading this year’s setups today
Nothing from these years maps cleanly onto a modern listing — there were no standardized parts or published results — so treat 'early Fast Fingers' references as cultural context, not provenance or value claims.
From the event
Setup-era context
Still being verified
- The founding date is framed two ways by official sources: the home page frames the tradition as starting in 1999, while the history page and Blackriver's timeline identify Fast Fingers 1 in 2000.
- The pre-2008 champions (Gläßel, Heck, Dietschi, and early Assmuth/Schlotthauer wins) and the exact edition→year mapping before FF11 (2008) come from a community history retrospective cross-checked with the trophy plaques, not an official results page. Country/nationality for the very early champions (Gläßel and Heck appear German; Dietschi appears Swiss per the 'D-Rex'/skateboarder.ch trail) is not asserted as confirmed here, so no structured winner record is created for these years.
References
Numbered references to the brand, retailer, and community pages that back this article. The label notes how firmly each source is established.
Official home page; frames the tradition as starting around 1999, and lists the upcoming live edition.
Official event history with the year-by-year world-champion list (2008 onward). Frames the contest as becoming the official Fingerboard World Championship in 2008.
Blackriver company milestones: founded 1999, Fast Fingers 1 in 2000, first fingerboard park, Blackriver Trucks (2010), Berlin shop (2010).
Official media archive linking photo/video sets for older editions (reference-only imagery).
Official flyer archive (reference-only imagery).
2022 community retrospective walking the full edition history. Used cross-checked against the engraved event trophy plaques as a secondary source for the early-year (pre-2008) champion names and the online-edition winners; treated as community evidence, not an official results page.
Independence & sources