X-Games 2023 BMX highlights

Wow.  Just fucking wow.  

A backwards bunnyhop won real street at Rincon, over the rail, down the big drop.  Fucking wow.

I learned backwards bunnyhops in 1988, because I was a dork, and knew I couldn't hang in flatland anymore, once the locomotive and whiplash were invented.  And by "hang" I mean place in the middle of the pack, in a class of  fifty 17& over intermediates, in flatland at an AFA Masters comp.  

So I started trying a bunch of weird bunnyhop tricks, just seeing what was possible.  Since I rode with skateboarders every weekend at the Huntington Beach Pier, I learned a few skate tricks on my bike, like half-Cabs (roolback to 180 bunnyhop) and no complys (footplant to 180 on flat), backside bonelesses (can-can footplant on a bank), and nollies (nosewheelie into a speed bump to hop).  

In the freestyle world at the time, those weren't even tricks.  Pretty much no one else did them.  Eddie Roman did footplants to 360's, along with dozens of other weird, hard, and innovative tricks.  So goofing around on my own, I got to where I could do 6-7 foot backwards bunnyhops on flat, 6-7 foot half-Cabs (on a freewheel, not freecoaster, so I could launch farther) and full Cabs (rollback to 360 bunnyhop, only landed a few).  I tried a bunch of other bunnyhop tricks, and famously spent years trying to pull a bunnyhop tailwhop, but never landed a single one.  None of those things were even considered tricks at the time.  

Then, 15-20 years later, with stronger bikes, and when street riding had progressed a lot, riders discovered those old skate-inspired tricks, and took them to gaps, drops, ledges, and banks.  They kept pushing them to new levels.  So as a complete dork of a rider from the 80's and 90's, I'm stoked to see an completely fucking insane, HUGE backwards bunnyhop win Real Street at the X-Games.  I never even dreamed something like that would be possible.  Mad props to Colin Varanyak, and all these riders.  

My favorite part of all the X-Games footage I've seen was the cutaway shot during the dirt jumping comp.  The camera panned over to Cory Nastazio, standing near a pole, watching the action, and just goes, "Wow."  Yeah... Wow.  

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Simple Session 2020 Men's BMX highlights

Simple Session 2020 happened this past weekend in Tallinn, Estonia.Watched this last night.  This course looks so fun, wish we had something like this to ride BITD.  But on the other hand, it's nice being old sometimes, the level of comp riding today is insane.  Levi Weidmann lands a smooth 1080 over the ginormous box jump... and comes in 12th?  Crazy.  There's some amazing shit in this clip.  Check it out.  If you've got time on your hands, here's the full men's BMX park comp from Simple Session 2020.  

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Simple Session 2020 Women's Highlights

The Simple Session 2020 happened last weekend in Tallinn, Estonia.  This still above isn't a bail, she lands these things.  It's freakin' amazing how much the women are tearing it up these days.  Above is a good look at the highlights.  Here's the link to the full Simple Session 2020 Sister Session.

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Ride Like a Girl? Damn... Wish I Could These Days

A big nothing, no footed can-cans, a huge backflip gone wrong, big airs, big carves, and more toboggans than a big snowy hill in Ohio in January.  This clip popped up on my YouTube yesterday, and I checked it out, partly to see just how good today's women BMXers were, and partly because I'm drawing a picture of Krys Dauchy (aka China Krys Darrington today), the first factory sponsored female BMX freestyler back in the 1980's.

Krys popped on the scene with her crazy contortionist stomach stand, which drove us boys crazy (OK, crazier).  We could have chalked that up to gymnastic female flexibility.  But Krys could RIDE, she was pulling backwards grip rides at a time R.L. Osborn and Joe Gruttola were doing that.  The only other woman riding well then was Alma Jo Barrera in Texas, pulling many of the popular tricks of the day.  BMX freestyle was, and still largely is, a Boy's Club. 

Now we're 33 years from when Krys Dauchy popped onto the scene, and these women just plain fuckin' rip in a skatepark.  Growing up as a Generation X kid, it was always an insult to say, "You throw like a girl," or "You ride like a girl," as we grew up.  The story is that Girl Skateboards got its name, making fun of this old saying.  Spoofing it.  There weren't a lot of women in sports, outside the Olympics then.  But in the weird world of action sports, there were a handful of female pioneers, and I met several of them in my own journey.  I saw Cara Beth Burnside skate Pipeline skatepark in about 1988, and there were only a couple guys there that night out skating her.  One of them was Micke Alba, the other 50 skaters couldn't hang with her.  She was that good of a skater back then, and went on to blow minds in women's snowboarding.  I knew Miki Keller at Vision in the 80's, when she worked as the Sims Snowboards team manager.  She went on to build women's motocross into a serious sport.  I saw Lori Rigsby skate at Houston Skatepark in 1990, another female pioneer.  Years later, I even gave street skating legend Elissa Steamer a ride in my taxi one night.  She said I was, "The first grownup" who recognized who she was.  I became good friends with hardcore rock climber, and American Gladiator, Salina Bartunek, while working on that show.  I started bouldering myself, inspired by her enthusiasm for climbing. 

These women all took a lot of crap, and became good at weird action sports, in a guy's world, at a time when their families and friends gave them crap for riding or boarding, and us guys in these sports, often gave them crap as well.  But they persevered, and inspired more and more girls and young women in the many years since, and now there are women ripping in pretty much every sport, Oh, AND the final Jedi knight in the final of the nine originally planned Star Wars movies, Rey, is a woman as well.  So as the testosterone pumps thick today, leading up to the Anaheim Supercross event in Anaheim, here in SoCal tonight, I figured I'd give some props to the women, still pioneering and breaking new ground, in the action sports, and mainstream sports, worlds.  Keep rippin' women!

Here's Krys Dauchy, women's BMX freestyle pioneer, busting out a flatland routine in 1987.  My Krys Dauchy Sharpie scribble style drawing will be available in a few days.  #sharpiescribblestyle

And here's a photo I shot of new school female ripper, who's competing in the park contest in the clip up top, S&M Bikes rider Jessie Gregory (@lilbmxwolf), busting I one footed Hannah at Sheep Hills.  This was at the Boozer Memorial Jam, a couple months ago. 

And here's a drawing I did for Alma Jo Barrera, from a photo of her competing in an AFA Masters comp at the Velodrome in 1987.

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Full Circle

Hogshit Rides 2018 Year End Edit

This showed up yesterday, courtesy of Jody Donnelly.  I watched it, and now I'm jonesin' to go ride (and to lose a ton more weight to make that happen).  Watch it, then get that New Year's session underway.