4Ply’s Peter Glover Is Crunching The Numbers On Your Favorite Skater

Images and graphics courtesy of Peter Glover

Have you ever wanted to know what trick Fred Gall has filmed the most or what colour pants Jordan Taylor has filmed the most footage in? 

Well, Pete Glover crunched those numbers and more so you don’t have to. If you’re asking yourself, ‘now why on earth would he do that?’ here’s your answer. Pete is one of the main brains behind 4PLY Magazine, an online “magazine” that looks at skateboarding through the lenses of data analysis and visualisation. An incredible concept, breaking down people's careers by the numbers, then talking to them about those numbers and the inspiration that could have led their skateboarding to look the way it does. It’s skateboard nerdery at its purest.

I am essentially maths illiterate, I failed maths in the 10th Grade and still struggle to verbally say numbers over 5 digits. I could never do this, so, I wanted to catch up with Pete to talk about bridging the gap between data analysis, statistics and skateboarding and how it can be cool and interesting. 

So, for those who don’t know what is 4PLY magazine?

4PLY is an online “skateboarding magazine”, we have no ambitions of actually publishing a real magazine. The focus is looking at skateboarding through a data analysis and data visualisation lens. Although it doesn't necessarily have to be that, and we have published a few things that aren't necessarily data-related. Data is just the main interest of everyone doing it right now. 

How did you come up with the idea to combine data collection and skateboarding?

So, 4PLY was started by Jared Wilber who is a skateboarder, computer scientist, and data engineer who works in tech. To just keep his chops up, he would do data visualisations on skateboarding. He did something for The Pudding, which is a data analysis website about music. Then he did an article for Jenkem about Jim Greco, analysing Jim Greco, his career and that's where I got familiar with his work. At the time I was trying to write stuff, not from a data perspective, but I had submitted articles to Jenkem and was doing a blog about skate videos. Seeing Jared’s work coincidentally aligned with me looking into studying coding, and data analysis. That inspired me, seeing that there was something that melds what I'm interested in and what I want to learn. I reached out to Jared, and he taught me about how he did it and how he logged everything for the Jim Greco piece.

Then he launched 4PLY in 2020, with the Eric Koston article, which was a follow-up article to the Jim Greco one. That’s where it started in my first pitch to him was Fred Gall then I started logging his footage and it went from there for me.

Where do you even start when you go to log all of someone’s footage?

A lot of people including some of the skaters that we cover and talk to think that we have a program that does this for us that can identify spots, tricks and stances. But no, it’s old school, we have a spreadsheet open, and while we're watching something, we’re pausing it, and typing out what the trick was. 

Damn, that is intense.

Yeah, and then you just end up with a big data set. Before you start, you should have the parameters of what you want to do, I learned that with my first article with Fred Gall. I went into that being like I want everything, all the videos he's ever been in, like he had two tricks in a Zoo York video, I want those. That was really sprawling, and I think I would have benefited greatly from kind of narrowing my scope a little bit or kind of understanding what story I wanted to tell. It can help if you're going to do someone's career knowing what you are going to cover. Is it every part? Is it every trick? Are you going to include guest tricks and other people's parts?

After collecting all the data, you end up with a big dataset and there are all the different coding tools from simply doing like pivot tables within a spreadsheet. I use Python and the Pandas library, which is a statistics data analysis kind of library of coding, and once you've written the code, you can kind of just alter it a little bit to coerce a different dataset into the same set of code. So, you're not starting from scratch every time. Then you just start to see what comes out the other end and if it matches what you think it would.

I really liked the Jordan Taylor article, where you did the statistics on what colour pants was he wearing.

I'm proud of that one. That was tough too because we're watching YouTube videos, some of which were uploaded in 240p, and Grey looks like blue looks like black depending on what the light is. That was pretty hard to work out at times. I thought about that one from the beginning when I was thinking what an interesting statistic for him would be. I’m stoked about how it came out.

You mentioned earlier that you wanted to study coding. What is your background in numbers and statistics?

Formally nothing at all. The only thing I can think of is as a kid I was really into the statistics on baseball cards, but I wouldn't have ever articulated it that way. I went to art school and got a degree in filmmaking. It wasn't until 2019 when I decided I wanted to make a career switch, that I realised I enjoyed doing budgets and spreadsheet-related tasks and wanted to go into data analysis. I explored online classes for spreadsheets, and then Python and data visualisation with Illustrator. Then that was when I saw Jared’s article about Jim Greco, and I was stoked because they always tell you when you want to learn something apply it to something you’re interested in. Seeing that I was like, this is a great way to do it. I didn't have any training other than, taking online classes.

Now I am a marketing data analyst for a small publishing company here in Portland, that covers business evaluation software. It has nothing to do with skateboarding but having experience doing both marketing and data with 4PLY those worlds come together really well to do marketing data.

The other day on the 4PLY Instagram story you guys did the statistics on Baker Has a Deathwish Part 2. Where do you even start with a video that is an hour and seven minutes long?

So, with that we knew when it was coming out, like they gave the exact hour it'd be coming out. We knew it would be pretty big. We thought it would be cool if we could do something straight away about the video. We tried to log it all within a day or two. So, we could post something about it we made a Google Sheets spreadsheet and worked on it all together. It was just the three of us Jared, Harrison Lisewski and me.

Harrison and I set up what are we going to cover, which was, the skater, the trick, the obstacle, the details of the obstacle and the stance. At first, we were going to do stair count but then were like no that’s going to be a bit of a chore for a video that long. Then we did slow motion and if a trick was replayed. 

That is crazy that you guys did it that quickly. How do people react when you come to them with all their stats?

Everyone sort of reacts differently to it. Tom Karangelov was the one who was most interested in seeing how his career shaped up and how things progressed. He related that to points of interest for him to say, ‘I can see where wallride started going way up because that's when I saw got into Pontus Alv and he was doing wallrides’. Then we started speaking about the ollie into little trick lines which is now what he is doing a lot of. He was very interested in what we discovered. I think a lot of skaters kind of don't give it too much thought they just kind of skate what they want, or they don't want to appear that they care too much about it. So even if they do give it a lot of thought. They don't want to admit that they're concerned that their switch percentage is way lower than their regular percentage.  

Fred Gall was really interesting too because he has such an incredible memory of skating. I mentioned that he didn’t do any backside smith grinds and he just replied I did one in a Habitat article in 411 and I watched it later and sure enough there is the trick.

What’s the most staggering skate statistic you’ve ever discovered?

That for almost every skater Ollie's are still the most done trick. Even during the Quartersnacks Top 10 the top of the list is regularly ollies and it's twice the amount of any other trick. I think sometimes a lot of skaters aren't necessarily as well-rounded as you think.

Other than ollies what was the most done trick of the 2023?

While we don't have the numbers to back it up, yet, my observations are that tricks that are on the rise are what I would define as "combo" tricks. This includes multi-obstacle tricks rail-to-curb, ledge-to-wall, bump-over-bar-to-ledge, there’s been a steep increase in manuals out of ledge tricks, and good old-fashioned ledge dancing noseslide to crooks.

While I wouldn't include flip-in and flip-out tricks as "combo", those are getting very common as well. Again, I don't have the statistical evidence collected, but I bet it would show that flip-in or out tricks are more abundant than straight-up slides and grinds.

What is the most skated spot that you've logged?

It's hard, nearly every year we compile the stats for the Quartersnacks Top 10. In those, there is definitely an East Coast bias. So, you see Muni in Philadelphia a lot and the Museum of Natural History in New York. So those two are the most skated currently from our data, especially Muni.  

We've been compiling magazine covers recently and it’s clearly Hollywood High where there have been the most covers.

Well, even the latest Thrasher cover is there and one last year.

Yeah, I think this latest one is the sixth Thrasher one and it's been in other stuff as well.

Slam the Australian magazine had a cover in 2017 that was an illustration of a bunch of Australian skateboarders sitting on the steps of the spot too. Do you ever put statistics into your own skating? For example, how many kickflips you’ve done in a session?

[Laughs] No, I’ve never analysed it but a couple of years ago I really wanted to finally get 360 flips really locked in so when I would go skate, I would try to do a hundred attempts. I would make notes of how many I would land of the hundred, how many attempts it would take to land the first one that I landed, and what the percentage of lands was. I’ve done that where I’ve tried to almost gamify it, so even if I’ve only landed three that’s three percent maybe I can take it to six percent. The sidenote is that I am still terrible at 360 flips and my highest was maybe landing ten out of the hundred.

That’s still pretty good. That’s one out of ten.

I think I also didn’t land any for the first sixty then I somehow, I landed like three in a row. It has never clicked. That is probably the closest I’ve gotten to trying to apply a numbers strategy to my own skating.

Finally, as the world changes and technology advances drastically by the day are you worried AI is going to take your job?

Well, I am looking forward for technology to be able to log skating, kind of what everyone thinks we do. The strength of 4PLY and a lot of data visualisation is the creativity, fun and energy that goes into it. Right now, I am not really afraid of it, I think it is a good thing that maybe those tools can be useful. There are much more horrifying things to worry about with technology and all that [laughs]. So, no not really, I am ready to embrace it.