ROLLING FORWARD —
A Special Sports Series | PART THREE OF THREE
Canroll was never just a festival. It was always a promise — to every young Sarawakian who ever loved something the world told them not to take seriously. Jensen Bong is 11 years old. He already knows.
Jensen Bong is eleven years old.
He is a rollerblader. He trains. He competes. He falls, gets up, tries the trick again until the muscle memory owns it and the body stops asking permission. He has been doing this long enough to have a style — not just technique, but style — the thing that separates a kid who skates from a skater.
This was his second year at Canroll.
His family came with him. They always do. Because Jensen’s family understands something that many families in this country are still learning — that what their son does on wheels is not a phase, not a distraction, not something to be tolerated until something more sensible takes over. It is his language. It is how he measures himself against the world and against yesterday’s version of himself.
Canroll, to Jensen Bong, is not an event. It is a reckoning. A place where everything he has trained for — every hour at the ramp, every bruise absorbed, every trick rebuilt from the ground up — gets put before judges, peers and a crowd that understands exactly what it is watching.
He was impressive enough that the judges noticed.
He doesn’t know yet what it took to build this stage — that the custom-fabricated mobile skate park beneath his wheels, welded from scratch, assembled before the event and dismantled after, represents an investment that industry benchmarks place north of RM200,000.
No one in Malaysia has built one like it. No one else has even tried.
Ask Nik who Canroll is for and he will give you an answer that sounds simple until you sit with it.
“A lot of KL people are killing to get this festival there,” he said, after the second edition wrapped. “And we are connected to many channels now. A lot of big players in the world recognise us. So don’t get stage fright competing on this platform. Train yourself. This will be something positive if you want to focus in this industry.”
He is not speaking to sponsors. He is not speaking to ministers or mayors or the Barcelona delegation or the X Games advocates he met in Paris.
He is speaking to Jensen. He is speaking to every Sarawakian — eleven years old or eighteen, boy or girl — who has ever loved a board, a blade, a BMX, a basketball, a futsal court at dusk. Canroll is Nik’s legacy, built for anyone who has ever felt the particular frustration of being passionate about something the adult world treats as peripheral.
Age is not the point. Gender is not the point. The passion is the point.
He is speaking to the version of himself that strapped on inline skates at fourteen with no plan beyond the next trick and a feeling, just a feeling, that there was more to all of this than anyone around him could see.
That feeling was right. It took him thirty years to prove it. Jensen Bong will not need thirty years. The proof is already built.
The Ember Between the Flames
Canroll does not sleep between its grand editions. It pulses.
This October — 23rd to 25th — Canroll Pulse arrives at Pikabol in Kuching. Smaller in scale, sharper in focus. No international delegations, no ministerial processions, no ten-country rosters. Just the local community, the disciplines they love, and the space to compete. Mini ramp. 3×3 basketball. Futsal. Pickleball. A run.
Five disciplines that together describe something important about what Canroll has always been trying to say — that urban sport is not one thing. It is not skating or BMX or one narrow corridor of cool. It is a culture, broad and inclusive and alive, that makes room for the runner and the baller and the kid who has never touched a skateboard but finds herself on a pickleball court and feels, for the first time, that this world has a place for her too.
Pulse is not a consolation event between the big ones. It is the heartbeat. The proof that Canroll is not a visiting circus that comes to town, dazzles, and disappears. It is a living ecosystem — one that breathes between editions, stays present in the community, keeps the fire burning at the local level while the international ambition builds.
“Don’t get stage fright,” Nik said. “Train yourself.”
Pulse is where the training becomes real.
April 2027
Mark the date. The third Canroll — the grand edition, the full international platform — returns to Kuching from the 7th to the 11th of April, 2027. Five days. Everything that Canroll 2 was, and more. More nations. More athletes. A deeper UWS sanction. A Barcelona partnership now one year further into its maturity.
And Jensen Bong will be twelve …
The same age Nik was when he first fell in love with skating. The same age at which, for a generation of Malaysian kids in the early 2000s, the circuit felt alive and the dream felt possible. The same age at which everything either crystallises or dissolves — when passion either deepens into commitment or gets quietly set aside for something more practical.
Jensen will have a stage in April 2027 that Nik never had at fourteen. A sanctioned international platform, in his own city. And on it, alongside athletes from Sarawak and every corner of the world, he will prove exactly what he is made of — on a stage built by a man who knew, from his own fourteen-year-old self, precisely what that moment would mean.That is the quiet miracle at the centre of Canroll that no press release will ever capture.
Nik didn’t just build a festival. He collapsed the distance between what a Sarawakian kid can dream
and what he can actually reach.
The Man at the Edge of the Next Big Thing
There is a European festival that has been running for thirteen years. Nik has been watching it for all thirteen. He has been running Canroll for two.
“I want to achieve in four years what they have done in thirteen,” he said.
He is not behind. He is two years into a four-year plan, with a Paris trip behind him, a Barcelona partnership in front of him, a Pulse edition in October and a grand return in April 2027. He has ministers in his corner, a mayor who has seen the skate park and been impressed, a UWS sanctioning body that is expanding its commitment with each edition.
He has Jensen Bong on the ramp, training.
When the second Canroll wrapped, someone asked Nik how he felt standing in the middle of everything he had built. His answer, characteristically, was not about the past.
“I just feel like it’s a stepping stone,” he said. “I’m already looking at what’s next.”
That is the only kind of founder who builds something that outlasts the moment it was built in. Not the one who celebrates the arrival. The one who is already moving toward the next departure.
What Stays
Jensen Bong will wake up on the morning of 7th April 2027 and strap on his skates.
He will warm up the way skaters do — quietly, privately, running the same lines until the body stops thinking and starts knowing. He will look at the ramp. He will look at the crowd. He will drop in.
In the world of professional inline skating, twelve is not young. That is exactly on time.
The athletes who compete at the highest levels of the global urban sports circuit — the ones who travelled to Kuching for Canroll, the ones Nik sat with in Paris, the ones who will return for April 2027 — most of them started where Jensen is standing right now. Same age. Same ramp. Same hunger. The only difference between Jensen Bong today and a professional rollerblader on the world stage tomorrow is time, training, and a platform that takes him seriously. He has all three.
Canroll Pulse in October will sharpen him. The grand edition in April 2027 will test him. And beyond that — Barcelona, the Urban World Series circuit, the international competitions Nik is actively building pathways into — the global stage is not a dream from here. It is a direction. A real, mapped, credible direction that did not exist for a young Sarawakian skater five years ago.
Canroll cannot teach a child to be fearless. It cannot manufacture talent or install ambition or guarantee that the kid who shows up nervous will leave transformed. What it can do — what Nik built it to do — is make sure that when the moment comes, the stage is there. World-class, sanctioned, serious. The kind of stage that tells a young athlete, before he even drops in, that what he does matters.
The Legacy
This is what Nik actually built.
Not a festival. A ladder.
One that starts at a mini ramp in Pika Bowl and, if the talent and the will are there, ends somewhere Jensen Bong cannot yet imagine — on a stage watched by the same global community that once felt impossibly far from Kuching.
In rollerblading, there is a moment just before a blader commits to a trick — a half-second of absolute stillness where the decision has been made but the body hasn’t moved yet.
Everything that follows depends on what happens in that moment. Whether he trusts the training. Whether he believes the ground will meet him right. Nik built the ground.
“You’ll see what’s coming,” he said. “Stay with this movement.”
We will. The ramp is ready.
Because every big dream starts the same way — with a child doing something that makes the rest of the world disappear, and a parent who believed in it before anyone else did. Canroll is where that dream straps on its skates and finds out how far it can go.
Rolling Forward — began on Sunday with From Borneo to Paris, continued on Thursday with Unlocking Sarawak, One Grind at a Time, and concludes here.
