Alan Hughes / March 10th, 2012 / Now Showing
NOW SHOWING #3: WRS Finals, City Hopper, Dinner

“City Hopper” – Sven Boekhorst
I used to watch Sven on TV all the time back when I was in high school in the far, far away land known as the 1990s. Back when the A.S.A. still stood for Aggressive Skaters Association. Sven was always a soft-spoken, super-tech, super-consistent skater that placed well at all the contests. He seemed to disappear like the majority of skaters from back then, but he has been popping up everywhere the last few years and this edit is a great example of why he is still an amazing skater.

Every good edit usually has a sort of theme or backbone to it. A p-rail edit, a tour edit, game of B.L.A.D.E. edit, or whatever — some kind of story that pulls it all together. Sven and his homies decided to take a portable, medium sized launch ramp to different skate spots and recognizable tourist attractions around the Netherlands. Whatever town you are in, I’m sure every skater can relate to wanting to do this. Like Sven said in the intro, “Because of the ramp, the perspective on how you look at spots changed. It seemed like anything was possible…” We all know that one rail or ledge in our town that looks sweet but is just a bit too high, or way too high, but if you could get a small launch ramp down there, we’d be in biz. That’s exactly what Sven did here.

The music here was really good, definitely the best I’ve heard from a Euro section in a while. A mix of a number of different tracks, they all transition smoothly and help define moving from one location or segment of the edit to the next. The biggest draw back to this edit was the editing itself. They shot a lot of angles of the same tricks, which is good, but they seemed to really want to make sure every single clip was used even when some probably shouldn’t, and some good angles got cut short and skipped to the next angle where you couldn’t see as clearly. It just skipped around a lot and sometimes really left me feeling like I missed the trick.

But as far as the skating itself, there were some crazy motocross-type gaps, and a giant 360 into a natural transition that looked to basically be the equivalent of a vert wall. He launches to a well-over-head-high rail at one point, then kung lao 360s over a golf cart-looking thing full of people at another point. He skitches, launches, and grinds up a very large drop off rail that would be impressive just to grind down, which he also does in a line after landing his grind up it. The most impressive thing is just the shifting scale of perceived skate spots in this edit. The same way we saw a big shift in rollerblading as a whole during the “Coup De Tat” era when the scale of rollerblading spots really began to pull away from the skateboarder scale of spots, and seeing roof gaps and dropping in from rafters of the skate park became a more and more common thing. All in all it was a very entertaining chance to see so many opportunities for new skate spots open up with just one small launch ramp, a really great edit to stir up the sometimes stagnant flow of tricks and styles.

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