For the love of the daffy

Posted bySkaternoonPosted inInspireTags:, , , , , ,

Predating Rodney Mullen’s professional skate career, the daffy is a rolling trick performed on two skateboards.

Four shots of Hitomi Komatsu on two skateboards.
Daffies by Hitomi Komatsu. Photo source: Freestyle Sk8 Magazine (2023).

A standard daffy consists of one foot doing a wheelie while the other foot does a nose wheelie. ‘Variations include rollerskate-like double-board tailwheelies and double-nosewheelies, but also crossfoot wheelies and spins’ (FSKB n.d.).

The daffy is also known as a ‘yeah right manual’, thanks to Tony Hawk’s games:

We’ll delve into the method behind this trick one day but, for now, we just want to make an appreciation post on the daffy and the skaters who own it.

Ellen O’Neal

Skating in competitions as early as 1975 (Porter 2022), Ellen O’Neal was a trailblazer for freestyle and women’s skateboarding. With a background in gymnastics and ballet, O’Neal had a ‘smooth, dancelike style’ (Gordon & Smith 2025). ‘She spun around on two boards at once: she resembled a figure skater, or an acrobat performing on a flat surface’ (Nusbaum 2020).

Warren Bolster asks Ellen O'Neal how she feels about 'two-board maneuvers'.
Skateboarder interviewer Warren Bolster asking Ellen O’Neal about daffies (1975).

Appearing in Skateboard – The Movie (1978), she inspired a generation of female skaters.

Lynn Cooper

Lynn Cooper started competitive freestyle skateboarding in the early 80s (Cooper 2021). Nowadays, he still competes and invents new tricks. Lynn is most well known for his Cooper flips, but he also daffies, performing them in runs such as the 1989 Savannah Slamma Pro Freestyle Contest and, more recently, the 2024 US Open of Freestyle Skateboarding.

One of our favourite Lynn Cooper clips is at Huntington Beach, CA; it showcases a fluid daffy style where tricks roll into the next and is a mesmerising watch.

Hitomi Komatsu

‘If you can’t ride one board, ride two skateboards’ was the advice Hitomi Komatsu received when she struggled to learn mainstream freestyle tricks like rail flips and caspers (Freestyle Sk8 Magazine 2023). Since then, Komatsu has focused on daffies, completing entire competition runs on two boards. Inspiration comes from not only other freestylers but also from inline skaters. Her preference for turns and gyrations and an aversion to banger flip tricks has resulted in long, flowing lines.

Isamu Yamamoto

The first freestyler to win a world championship using two skateboards (Surfer Today n.d.), Isamu Yamamoto is one of the most technical freestylers on the scene. His skateboarding is always innovative and it is the same when he is on two boards. Daffy lines feel less grazioso and more staccato with the liberal use of propeller pivots and two-board flip tricks (i.e. shuvits, impossibles, fingerflips). Yamamoto’s two-skateboard-trick bag is so varied that we’re going to have to leave more than one example from this Japanese maestro.

Special mentions

No daffy discussion would be complete without mentioning Kevin Harris: in 1979, a seventeen-year-old Harris completed 1032 consecutive two-board 360s, setting a new record (Guiness World Records n.d.). In a Ride Channel video, he talks about the experience and explains the mechanics of the trick.

Cheyenne Williams is also another skateboarder to watch. The amateur freestyler has been putting work into daffies and adding them to her competition lines. It will be interesting to see how far she progresses with these.

A final word

While some skaters think that daffies are dorky, two-board tricks are a part of our freestyle legacy and, when done right, can transform a routine. We’ve shared some of our favourite daffy clips from some serious daffy pros; if you think we’ve missed some hidden gems, please let us know in the comments below.

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Published by Skaternoon

I'm an adult skate noob who started rolling around during Melbourne's COVID lockdowns. Freestyle skateboarding is my forte, and I keep a skate diary on Instagram (@skaternoon), which gets updated a couple of times or more a week. There's not a lot of Australian-specific resources for freestylers. I got tired of waiting for some so I decided to start my own at flatlandia.org. If you're interested in helping out, let me know.

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