| Event: BS/B3 #4 & X Trials #2, BS finals date: June 15-17 Place: Lake Compounce, Bristol, CT Medias: HSAcentral.com |
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| FLATLAND | |
| www.hsacentral.com: Flatland finals for the BS 2001 Series went down in blistering heat, humidity, and the terror of some freshly paved tar that melted its way onto everyone's tires and socks. It was not a pretty situation. But there were 10 that persevered the circumstances, and they are now wealthier because of it. Here's those dudes and what they did. 10th place.Chad Degroot. Chad had an amazing run in the prelims, but fell apart in the finals. Chad had some amazing tricks, such as a front wheel decade to karl kruzer to bar endo to half cab barspin. No one has the style of originality that Chad has. And he did it all in black pants. He says he didn't know it would be so hot. 9th place.Matt Wilhelm. Matt also had an amazing run in prelims, which earned him first. And unfortunately, there's only one way to go when you qualify first. Matt is all smiles about it though, which is good. Matt did pull the pedaling Kuoppa pedal picker spin to upside down pedaling megaspin route, which was probably the crowd favorite. 8th place.York Uno. York consistently makes the finals, which we'd attribute to his steamroller to hitchhiker links. No one else does those in pro flat. He also threw in the no hand hitchhiker and the inside circle circle k with his leg resting on the top tube. 7th place.Jorge Gomez. Fly Bikes rider Jorge has some of the most innovative snappy riding I've seen in quite a while. I'd describe more of it, but it's hard stuff. One thing that's cool is his switch footed ride in to turbine wheelchair straight to gliding backyard. Esta muy grande, or something like that meant to mean it's real good. 6th place.Art Thomason. Hoffman Bike's semi-neighbor and rider took sixth place with some more of the most consistent riding of the contest. Want to know Art's secret? Check out the inaugural issue of Flatland Manifesto video magazine, available at www.backlashbmx.com. I don't mean to throw in a harmless plug, but this has an in depth interview with Art that's damn good. 5th place.Ryoji Yamamoto. Ryoji is another Japanese rider making a name for himself on the scene with some innovative rolling switches, like the whiplash walkaround. Look for him at the X games to learn more.... 4th place.Stephen Cerra. Stephen made it into another finals, with tricks like knee stand megaspins and no foot pumping tomahawks. Stephen has had a great year in contests. Watch out for this ripper at the X Games as well. 3rd place.Martti Kuoppa. Well, after countless years of Trevor Meyer's domination, Martti made a change. He won the 2001 series year-end title, with his amazing style and innovation. If you want to know what determination is, watch Martti ride. He has made the impossible possible, and he does it all with a smile on his face. Congrats Martti! 2nd place.Nathan Penonzek. Nathan is the name you're used to seeing near or at the top, and that's for good reason. He drove straight from Vancouver, a five-day trip, to make it to CT to ride in the comp. Minus sleep and practice, Nathan made the finals and made it count. 1st place.Phil Dolan. Phil, aboard his new Fly flatland bike, made some good money this weekend, scoring first place with some good stuff, like pedal picker glides and switch foot hang 5 glides on the pedal. Congrats Phil. Ok, the BS series is done for this year, my laundry needs to go in the dryer, and this story is officially done. Go ride.. -brian. 2001 BS Year End Flatland Title: Martti Kuoppa www.bmxtrix.com: As we rolled into the parking lot at about 9:30 in the morning and paid five bucks for parking we were ready for 'another' wonderful ESPN contest. Upon walking in we realized that the X-Trials are NOT like other contests. The five bucks was given back to us and we were handed a parking pass (media). We walked a few hundred feet across gravel to a brand new blacktop area. Not perfectly flat, but still pretty close. The asphalt was no more than a week old and seemed like it would be the ideal surface to make all the riders happy. Clean, sticky, smooth.... Four hours later at 90 plus degrees (about 34 degrees centigrade) with a ton of humidity did wonders to screw up the flatland area. Asphalt began to melt and shed tiny sticky pebbles that stuck to everyone's tires and made scuffing... ummmm.... interesting to say the least. It wasn't really that bad, but it was not the ideal surface that everyone was hoping for. Oh well. Riders missing from the contest of note... Or should we say rider. Trevor Meyer pulled a no show at the last X-Trials event of the year. No rumors, no news, just a no-show. He wasn't missed by any and the riding that was going down made jaws drop regardless. Qualifiers went down at about one in the afternoon when temperatures were peaked. 26 entrants were broken into two groups (Gabe Kadmiri showed up and was not allowed to enter). Highlights included Kotaro doing fuck trucks (coasting lawnmowers straight into death trucks) into pedaling death trucks - sick. Adam Pintek was on a GT Show with 6 pegs and no cranks doing hitchhikers with holding the 'crank pegs' and dropping the bike so it was 2 inches above the ground. Day Smith was still recovering from to much partying the night before and just wasn't up for riding, but still didn't end up in last place. Bryan Huffman rides all day and during his run his back wheel screws up on him. Aaron Behnke was whining about people standing within 30 feet of him with a camera and asked them to go stand in the corner. Bad, Aaron, bad... way to try to get ANY coverage for your sponsors. Why the hell do they bother? Aaron Frost finally made the cut to enter the X-Trials events and finished in 21st... He didn't really finish in 21st, but what do judges know? Takashi hit a triple barflip to halfhiker in practice, but simply could not put it together for qualifiers. Keith King simply gets a mention because he has a website called keithking.com which you should go check out right now. Sean Peters got dead last. This is especially noteworthy because less than five years ago he was doing longer runs with the exact same tricks and hitting the run flawlessly. Strange things happen to riders when they get older. Oh... and Chad Degroot qualified in second. If the videos from the event end up on the site you may wonder why he qualified at all... but the qualifiers were pretty sketchy and Chad rode really well. In the finals Chad couldn't keep up the pace and he fell from 2nd place qualifying to 10th place finals... you can still see him in the X-Games though. A few hours passed and we grabbed some food and watched the vert qualifiers then headed back over for flatland finals. There was a lot of pressure that got to the first place qualifier, Matt Wilhelm, and he simply couldn't hold it together to put together a clean run. He ended up in the number nine position after screwing up on his signature blender bike flip to upside down megaspin. York Uno picked up the number eight spot with his typical brakeless combos including jugglers and tomahawks. He also was doing some crazy spastic wheelchair glide that was just fun to watch. Seventh place went to Jorge 'Viki' Gomez, who was riding incredibly all day long but couldn't put together a good run. He was possibly doing the hardest tricks in practice including some very sick cross-footed front wheel pinky squeak/rolling combos. He should have done better. Art Thomason scored sixth place after hitting a near flawless run. He should have done MUCH better as no other rider hit a flawless run on the sketchy flat surface. The highlight of his run was a spinning hitchhiker to a 360 barflip straight back into a spinning hitchhiker. Ryoji Yamamoto was representing Dragonfly and was pulling a bunch of different front wheel/switch footed variations including his one-handed side squeak kickflip and a cool half-whopper ride out from mccircles. Count him in at fifth. Top three did not consist of Martti, Nate, or Phil - it included Stephen Cerra... But the judges didn't agree with me. Stephen his a really solid first run with a crazy no-footed tomahawk and a solid upside down pedalling megaspin as well as his usual 360 barflip combos. Oh well, fourth will have to do. The number one overall flatlander for the year, Martti Kuoppa, could only manage to land third place at this event. After hitting incredible runs at every contest he went to this year, he simply couldn't pull his signature moves on the first try. It was still Martti though and that means the no-handed blender happened, the steamroller kick flip happened, and a long combo at the end that could have put him in first place if he hit it clean, including a turbined cliffhanger, barflip, cliffhanger. Nathan Penonzek hit a sick no-handed stick bitch combo and a really long no-footed t-glide. He also hit his jump from the rear pegs into cross-footed steamroller. It was good stuff, but pretty typical of Nate. Solid though. First place went to England's own, Phil Dolan. Phil had been struggling and getting frustrated throughout the day with his hitchhikers, but pulled them together for the finals and was doing nose-wheelies with his right foot on the left pedal and his other foot off. He also hit a really clean stick bitch combo that finishes with him coasting 20 feet backwards standing on the pedals. It was super tech, but he dabbed the ground a couple of times. The judges didn't care and he walked home with the gold. |
FLATLAND FINAL 1.Phil Dolan 2.Nathan Penonzec 3.Martti Kuoppa 4.Stephen Cerra |
| VERT | |
| www.hsacentral.com: The BS series 2001 vert finals will surely go down in the record books.
Not just for the riding, but for the carnage. Prelims saw a plethora of broken bones and
stitches, including Jamie Bestwick (broken elbow), Achim Kujawski (broken wrist and ribs), Thad
Miller (broken arm) and Tom Stober (cut his upper lip so hard that his teeth pierced his skin
hard enough to almost come through, or something like that.) Anyway, halfway through prelims, we left. It was not fun to watch my friends killing themselves. We went for chinese food and hoped for a better finals, which we got. 10th place was yet another injury. Josh Harrington, Greenville's newest wonder boy, fell during practice and had to sit out the finals because of some sort of arm injury. He still got 10th place bucks for it. 9th went to Macneil rider Jim Burgess, doing it for the Beast with high airs, stalled nosepicks and good flow. 8th went to someone we haven't seen on the vert scene for a while now, Dave Osato. Dave learned 540's recently, which he threw down effortlessly. He also pulled a tailwhip bunnyhop drop in to end his runs. It was insane. In front of Dave at the 7th place spot was another Schwinn rider, Jay Eggleston. You should be used to seeing Jay in the finals somewhere by now, and that's because Jay goes higher and does smoother 540's than most anyone else in the pro class, and Jay always ends with the no-handed fakie, which is damn cool. Ahead of Jay in 6th was Germany's Stefan Geisler, riding for KHE. Stefan ruled the ramp with over extended topside double can cans and good height on just about everything. And the top five are: Mongoose's Jason Davies landed in 5th, complete with a Motorhead style beard and newly learned tailwhip airs. Jason has a vert style that flows so good in both directions. He can make regular airs look amazing, which is nice. 4th place went to the Spanish Fly, Eduardo Terreros. Eduardo is usually known as the guy who kills himself, but here he pulled it all together with the highest airs of the contest, some crazy superman seatgrabs and an X-Games spot. Congrats dude. 3rd place is another name we haven't seen in the vert finals in a while, and that's Jay Miron. I don't even think Jay has a vert ramp to practice on, but you'd never know it. Jay was riding awesome, pulling his usual bag of tricks and throwing down some new ones. I even saw Jay try a hang-5 style toothpick grind. What I really appreciate about Jay is the difficulty of his lip tricks, alongside his height and his array of good variations. Not many other vert riders have the lip skills that Jay has. 2nd place went to semi local boy Kevin Robinson, who went for his trademark flair variations, including the no-handed and switch handed variety. Kevin made it onto the front of the local newspaper too. That's when you know you're big time. And in first place, for his first BS win, was Mongoose's English connection, Simon Tabron. Simon has 900's wired to the point where he can throw them down in his first run. And to end it, he even did an alley oop 900 with a lot of backwards travel on it. It was a very good way to end the contest, and another year of insane vert progression for the BS series. What can we expect next year? Who knows what the resi vert ramp will bring? To be continued... www.bmxtrix.com: Vert is something that you simply have to be nuts to do correctly. This of course applied to over two dozen riders that all were trying for the final two qualifying spots at the X-Games. Despite this being called 'day 2', the qualifiers for Vert actually went down on Friday afternoon between the flatland qualifiers and the flatland finals. Qualifiers had a few things going on that made it good - most notably was the absence at the contest of Rick Thorne, Ryan Nyquist, and Dave Mirra. Probably due to the fact that all three of them are already qualified at the X-Games. This left a lot of pros competing that had not made the cut yet. Koji Kraft was one that needed to qualify to get his shot to compete for a qualifying spot - but he simply didn't put together two solid qualifying runs because of injuries and only managed 12th spot. This means that he won't be at this years X-Games unless he gets a special invite. For those ten that did qualify for the finals, eight of them were all looking to get one of the two spots to the X-Games. This meant that a bunch of new faces were going to be going all out to get a spot at the big game. All bets were off. Saturday morning rolled around and we made the usual stops at Dunkin Donuts and I finally got some new video tapes at a local K-Mart. Then we made it to the contest area which was looking like it was going to product another hot, but dry day. No rain is always a good thing, but 90 plus degrees outside with a full-face helmet was enough to leave some of the pros complaining. This wasn't really to bad overall though since there weren't any major complaints about the ramp, and the light breeze that came in every now and then wasn't enough to screw up the riders. Josh Harrington wins the award for most bummed rider... He was injured during practice after qualifying for the finals and couldn't ride - that left him walking home with tenth place - sad. There were just a few tricks that really stood out in the event for the day and one of those tricks were owned by the guy who got eighth place, Dave Osato. He didn't have the height and tricks overall to push his placing any higher, but he did have the steel gonads to throw down the first ever bunnyhop tailwhip drop in on a vert ramp. He had tried it during qualifiers and nearly died, but put together perfection for the finals to hit something new. Eduardo Terreros did not really have the huge tricks, but he made up for it by doing the tricks he could do at least five feet higher than any other rider. We are talking about airs that were pushing close to 15 feet. It was really easy to tell that he was going much higher than the other guys, but the lack of tricks held him back from placing better than the number four spot. It was still good enough to land him the last qualifying position to the X-Games. The second to the last X-Games qualifying position went to the Canadian Beast - Jay Miron. He had pretty much avoided the ESPN contest circuit for the entire year, and during qualifiers it looked like he had missed a lot of practice time. Finals were a different story though as he went full tilt and was hitting tricks back to back like it was nothing. It did show that he was a little rusty, but he did hit an incredible backwards nose-wheelie all the way across the deck and back into the ramp. He had tried the trick about thirty times in practice and only hit it once, but it only took one try during the finals to nail it perfect. Second place went to the guy who qualified first, Kevin Robinson. Kevin is really making this a habit with his trademark corkscrew flairs, which he hit back to back. He also hit a clean no-handed corkscrew and what looked like a cross-handed to no-handed corkscrew. Definitely a top placing run, but one spot away from first. Simon Tabron has tricks that can win contests regardless of what anyone else does. But he has to pull them all, which is what usually holds him back. Not today. Simon was going big and hitting some big tricks back-to-back like it was nothing. But first place took something extra... So for his first run he threw down a perfect 900. That left one run and a need for a trick better than a 900. Okay, maybe there is no better trick. So Simon added a little alley-oop action to the 900 and nailed it perfect. The crowd went nuts, and the contest ended with little guess as to who won. Simon was stoked. |
VERT FINAL 1.Simon Tabron 2.Kevin Robinson 3.Jay Miron 4.Eduardo Terreros 5.Jason Davis 6.Stefan Keisler 7.Jay Eggleston 8.Dave Osato 9.Jim Burgess 10.Josh Harrington |
| PARK | |
| The park was cancelled due to a lot of rain. www.bmxtrix.com: There is little in this world that is more relaxing while you sleep then listening to raindrops patter against the side of the hous... wait... WAIT! Was that rain? Oh crap! What time is it? 10:00AM? Oh man, this has got to pass or there won't be a street contest going on today. 11:00AM - Still Raining 12:00 - Noon - Still Raining 1:00PM - Still Raining 2:00PM - POURING 2:01PM - We pack everything back into the van and begin the drive back home. Though we didn't wait for the 'official' cancel of the event, there was little doubt that the contest was over. This would mean that there is absolutely no coverage of what went down... Except, we filmed and took pictures of practice from the day before. That was about three hours of riding from guys that were hoping that they would be competing the next day for a shot at the X-Games. They had broken the riders into three groups of about ten, and each group got about an hour on the course. Most of the riders were taking it easy, just getting used to the ramps and saving their energy for the upcoming event. A few riders were going all out and having fun with the day. Koji Kraft - Koji loves to ride, it's that simple. Injuries plague him simply because he has the nuts to go for tricks that you and I can't do, and his knee was bugging him this time. But during practice he was still flowing over the spine throwing down big tailwhips with ease, and supermans over the box jump that would make TJ Lavin look twice. Tom Haugen wasn't going all out and told me it wasn't worth my time to film him because he wasn't going to do anything... That was right before he went up and hit five or six flawless tailwhip tailtaps. Glad I ignored him. Jay Miron wasn't really going for variety during practice, he was having fun. He spent most of the time messing around on the min-sub rail, spine, mini-sub box combo that ESPN had set up. Big tailtaps and grinds happened regularly from him, but his big trick for the practice was a super tech whiplash on the six inch board on top of the spine back in flawless. Dave Osato was getting irked because he hadn't been able to nail the tailwhip on the sub rail. No, that's not quite true... he hit it on the very first try and then couldn't hit it again. That is always irritating because you already know you can do it, but then can't repeat. Well, Dave is a determined guy, and before practice was over he had hit the tailwhip solid. Cory Martinez was flowing through the course with lots of style. His transfers off the wedge ramp onto the sub wedge with a big invert thrown in were beyond stylish. Another rider was eying up a transfer from the wedge that led up to the top of the sub box to make a transfer into the sub box the next day... but no contest meant that we never got to see that transfer happen. Oh yeah, this guy was doing backflips to manuals. John Heaton... maybe you've heard of him. He had a great transfer line setup and was working hard to transfer up to the top of the small sub box with a backflip manual. About ten tries and one run in with some guy with a video camera (sorry John) is all it took before he finally hit it perfectly. Of course, once you have one trick down, it's time to step it up. About twenty minutes later John went up and hit the backflip to manual transfer onto and back into the small sub box then went across the park course to do a flip transfer up the twelve foot sub box. What audience was there went nuts, Jay Miron who had just bailed on the spine was asking if the applause was for him. So, no contest, but the best part of the contest still happened. Practice and riding with others. A good session, but no big run from Mirra. There was a lot of questions from riders as to how the final spots for the X-Games would be determined. I think for Jay it was his first ESPN event of the year so he needed it more than others if he wanted a qualifying position. We will keep our eyes posted for how the Hoffman and ESPN crew will figure out how things will be done. |
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