17/08/2026
On August 12, 2026, in a quiet corner of Novales, Huesca, in northern Spain, Olympic skateboarder Danny León pulled off one of the most precisely engineered shots in sports history. As a rare total solar eclipse swept across the country, the first to cross Spain in more than a century, León launched off a custom-built ramp at the exact moment the moon fully covered the sun, his silhouette framed perfectly against the glowing solar corona.
The image looked like pure luck. It was anything but. The project had been more than a year in the making. Photographer José Ángel Izquierdo used specialized software to calculate precisely where the sun would appear in the sky, then scouted locations until he found a private hillside property with the right light, landscape, and sightlines. The team brought in SB Ramps to build a custom quarterpipe on site, installing it the day before the eclipse and testing it into the evening. Filmmaker Gonzalo González de Vega and a seven person crew set up cameras several hundred meters away to capture the shot from a distance.
León, a two time Olympian who competed in Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024, trained through the morning and again in the late afternoon before the real pressure began. Totality at that location lasted roughly a minute, and the sun sat low on the horizon, close to sunset, making the timing window brutally tight. A jump off by even half a second would have turned the shot into an ordinary silhouette against a darkening sky. Instead, León nailed it, floating off the ramp as the moon slid fully in front of the sun.
