Doin' it at the Dew Tour
Jun 29 2006 / Louisville, KYLast Night in Louisville: Time to Plan Your Own Nationwide Skate Adventure
I thought I was closing out my Louisville blog as I was typing yesterday’s entry about how fun it was to watch the athletes’ practice sessions before and between runs in the main event. But last-night’s post-contest session at the Louisville Extreme Park reminds me that I need to remind you that this thing that people other than you and I are now calling an “action sports lifestyle” doesn’t begin or end with contests or huge, packaged events like the Dew Tour.
When I was first invited to join the Lat34 team for this trip and asked to help provide expanded coverage of the Dew Tour, I looked at the list of venues thinking, “Hell, yeah. I’m finally going to get to skate that full-pipe park in Louisville.” I came here to work, packing a laptop and camera, but I also came to skate.
We finally rolled over to the Louisville Extreme Park after yesterday’s Vert Finals. Andy Macdonald tipped us off that he was headed to the same place, as if we needed convincing: Jon Burns (Lat34’s Executive Producer) and I flew into Louisville on Thursday with boards and helmets at the ready, and we’d been chomping at the bit to skate through four days of hammering away at our computers on-site at the Panasonic Open and late into the night in our hotel rooms. An assurance that a pro session would be going down was mere kindling to stoke the fire.
You probably read the name Louisville Extreme Park, like I did, and thought, “Damn, that’s a dumb name.” But if anything in the world of extreme sports ever deserved to be called extreme, it’s the gargantuan 24-foot full-pipe and huge surrounding bowls here in Louisville. There are also some smaller bowls, a nice street course, and a vert ramp, but the full-pipe is the reason you should get yourself to Louisville.
As we skated up to check it out for the first time, we recognized Chris Miller inside the pipe, somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 o’clock. Miller is an old favorite of ours here at Lat34, and was in town in support of his Adio Shoes team. Andy Macdonald was working on a crazy ice-plant trick into the full pipe, launching off the hip into the pipe then planting a foot, grabbing indy, and looking back over his shoulder to say cheese before boosting into the mouth of the beast from way up in the oververt.
Tony Magnusson, another old Lat34 fave, was milling about, and Benji Galloway showed up to put it down. If the same 12 skaters from the Panasonic Open Skate Park contest had a rematch here on the concrete bowls, let’s just say Galloway wouldn’t be in 12th place and Sheckler wouldn’t be in 1st place. Are we all in agreement?
Macdonald and Miller were already tearing the place up when we arrived, and a ripping young local am named Dane Warren was doing his damnedest – and succeeding – to prove he deserved to be among their ranks. Me and my boss? Not so much. But we still had a great time carving the full-pipe and zipping around in the smaller bowls, and it was an honor to session with some of the greatest.
I’m looking at the rest of the schedule for the Dew Tour, and I’m seeing a full summer of similarly spectacular sessions ahead. Did the Dew Tour folks intentionally map out a travel itinerary to coincide with some of the country’s best parks? The Denver Skatepark and its many suburban satellites. Burnside and the comprehensive system of concrete parks in the vicinity of Portand. Acres of new roundwall parks around San Jose. Huge new parks in Orlando, and old favorites, including Kona, all around the rest of Florida.
Plenty of music fans spend their summer following their favorite bands across the country; skate fans looking for adventure could do much worse than to follow the Dew Tour. See you on the road?
– Colin Bane
Update: June 25, 2006
Good and as it Should Be
The last four days have been a whirlwind. I’ve seen some tremendous skate, BMX, and FMX action here in Louisville, and not just in the Finals. When you watch these kinds of events on TV, you could be tricked into thinking that the pros just show up, take their two quick runs, and that’s it. But the Dew Tour is set up as an all day festival, and the athletes’ practice sessions are actually a main attraction. Even the practice runs the pros sneak in while you’re at home watching commercials are entirely worth watching.
I sat and watched the pro skaters practicing for almost an hour today before the competition, and made a few noteworthy observations. First of all, the pros are just generally a great group of guys, and everybody here wants to see everybody else at their best. There really aren’t huge rivalries here. Nobody wants to see anybody else go down; everybody wants to see the sport advanced. Bob Burnquist was plenty psyched to win, but you had the feeling he would have been just as psyched to see it go to somebody who outdid him. Likewise, Andy Macdonald and Bucky Lasek were cheering just as hard for Burnquist as any other fan in the Freedom Center.
A guy in front of me held up a sign during the Finals that said “Bucky Fan Since 1988” and I had to laugh, thinking, “Yeah, me too” as I remembered how many times I watched Public Domain over and over again when I was in Junior High. Today, I added Lincoln Ueda, Pierre-Luc Gagnon, Tas Pappas, and Jean Postec to my list of skate heroes.
I know firsthand the sense of camaraderie and community that often takes shape around a great local skatepark, as well as the snowballing creative energy that helps propel everybody forward when a big session is going off, and I saw it on the ramp today between the pros.
To me, this is what skateboarding is all about, and it’s the reason I still look up to guys like Bob Burnquist, Andy Macdonald, Bucky Lasek, and Neal Hednrix after being in the sport as an average joe for as long as most of them have been pros.
The crowd saw it too, and I think that’s an important aspect of what events like the Dew Tour can do for action sports. Just because it’s a sport and a contest doesn’t mean there has to be a lot of attitude and posturing; today’s contest felt more like one team working together than twelve guys competing against each other. In other words: as it should be.
The Sky is Falling: FMX Preview Highs and Lows
Update: June 23, 2006
A confession: I come to the Dew Tour with a background mostly in skateboarding. Although I’ve seen FMX on TV plenty of times and generally think people doing crazy, perilous, life-and-limb-threatening activities is perfectly entertaining, this trip to Louisville marks my first time ever seeing the sport in person.
The new FMX course for this year – crisscrossing launch ramps, a giant wall ride, a strange step-up/step-down setup, and a massive 90-foot gap – helps boost my interest immensely, adding tremendous fluidity to a sport that always struck me as too straightforward. I love Evel Knievel just as much as the next dude, but, truth be told, the linear FMX huckfests I’ve seen televised have never really done it for me, and a backflip actually gets less impressive if you tack some lame variation onto it just because. Did anyone ask for my opinion?
Let me lay it out: I prefer pool skating over anything else, I can’t stand it when snowboarders sit on their butts scoping out one isolated hit on a huge mountain or skaters dwell on a single rail in a big city, and I’d argue that FMX riders still have some learning to do: Action sports should be all about fluid, creative lines; big stunts aren’t everything.
Rethinking the FMX course layout seems like the critical first step, and I give props where props are due.
Now that I’ve been right up in the action with the smell of dirt and the roar of engines in the air, I’ll admit it: FMX is pretty cool, especially with the recent injection of flow from the new skatepark-inspired course designs.
My biases are on the table and I’m on my way to becoming a convert, so let me say this: My favorite rider in today’s Prelims was Ronnie Renner. He placed 5th, after big name pros I’d actually heard of, ignoramus that I am – Travis Pastrana, Nate Adams, Ailo Gaup, and Kenny Bartram. Those guys went big and deserve respect, and clearly I have no business judging FMX, but if I were up on the tower today I would have given it to Renner, with Bartram in second. Here’s why:
1. Motosports should be fast, and Renner went flying through the course as if the ticking clock actually meant something. In comparison, everyone else seemed to be lollygagging, especially as they set up each trick. What is this, the Prelims? Oh, right. Gentlemen, the pace has been set.
2. Renner worked the new course design to full effect, laying tracks on the wallride a few feet above the previous high-mark and soaring out of the quarterpipe, and when he did go for the giant crowd-pleasing hucks, he went huge.
3. His Kiss of Death made the trick worthy of its name, and when the announcer kept calling some trick a “Knack-Knack” during everybody’s runs, I wasn’t even sure I knew what he was talking about until Renner illustrated it clearly with a fully-tweaked textbook example.
Here’s to less hooking toes under handlebars and landing sidesaddle, and more off-axis quarterpipe launches and hauling ass.
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Update: June 22, 2006
As you make your way around Louisville, you’ll periodically see signs letting you know that firearms aren’t allowed, implying, of course, that in any otherwise unmarked areas you’re pretty much good to go.
Ever since the Lat34.com team arrived on the scene, we’ve just gone ahead and assumed that pretty much everyone in town is packing heat, except in the designated areas, so we’ve been trying not to laugh too hard or too publicly about the fact that, every time we drive from our Dew Tour digs at Kentucky’s historic Brown Hotel to the Panasonic Open venue at the Kentucky Exposition Center, we pass an upstanding Louisville tobacco and smoke shop establishment by the name of Cox’s Smokers Outlet. Still, it’s never going to get less funny, so here’s hoping we don’t all get shot and go to hell while we’re here in Louisville.
Some other surprises at the Dew Tour so far:
- Kyle Berard, our up-and-comer pick for the Skateboard Park contest, is out after a 17th place finish in the Prelims.
- 11 year-old Nyjah Houston followed up on his first place finish in the Open Qualifier with a second place finish in the Prelims after Ryan Sheckler, beating out Jereme Rogers, Ronnie Creager, and Benji Galloway, among others.
- Wait a minute, did I just say Benji Galloway? The Lat34.com team was pleasantly surprised to see one of our favorite pool skaters in the Park contest at the Dew Tour in the first place, and we’re looking forward to more after another surprise: he qualified (just barely) for the finals.
- Dave Mirra did a huge backflip tailwhip in his first run of the prelims, then followed it up with a backflip drop-in from the deck above the vert wall. Wait a minute, this is the Prelims, right? We’re really looking forward to the Finals.
Not so surprising:
- Sheckler’s still holding it down.
- Morgan Wade, our up-and-comer pick in BMX Park, made us proud.
- It’s hot in Kentucky. Damn hot.
