Indholdsfortegnelse for 230 Winter 2021 i Slam Skateboarding

The magnitude of sorrow that Trent Riley’s family, his girlfriend, and his best mates are going through is difficult to fathom. One night, in the weeks after Trent went missing, I found myself revisiting an online letter that struck a chord on dealing with grief, and it may resonate with some of the people trying to cope with the despair of Trent’s disappearance. Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files are a direct one-to-one online correspondence with his loyal disciples (e-newsletter followers). And in a particular question put forward late last year, a follower from Stockholm wrote about the heart-wrenching loss of his wife and his brother. The question posed was, how does Nick go on after losing his son? [Arthur Cave tragically passed away in 2015 at age 15]. Few…

“I’ve just been head down, bum up all week,” says Rob Lewers, founder and owner of Concrete Skateparks. It’s a Friday arvo and it must be nearly beer o’clock down on the NSW Central Coast, where Rob’s working on a new skatepark at Narrara. Rob has spent the past 25 years building skateparks all over Australia, from Paddington to Belconnen to Nimbin to the more recent Sydney Park, which he describes as an “absolute nightmare”. It takes many different skills to build a skatepark, from design to surveying to earthworks to formwork to steelwork to concreting. There are also negotiations with councils, contracting and then pulling together a solid crew to get it all done. A lot of that can go wrong. Before the interview begins, I ask Rob if…

When I spoke to Shaun on the phone, he’d just escaped Melbourne’s most recent lockdown, grabbing a cheap, last-minute flight to Sydney to stay with his mate Jack O’Grady. In a warmer climate and with relative freedom, Shaun said he was in holiday mode, but that he might get some skating done too. He also told me about the ups and downs of shooting this feature, from hassles with local law enforcement in Melbourne to a giant turd that captured the attention of everyone at IMAX one Friday afternoon. As you can see by the array of heavy tricks he put down for this photo spread, Shaun isn’t afraid to get busy. Type Shaun Paul’s name into Google, and your browser will autocorrect to Sean Paul, a Jamaican dancehall artist…

It isn’t long now until the Tokyo Olympics and for the first time in history skateboarding appears at the world’s largest sporting competition. Love it or loathe it, chances are we’ll all be tuning in to watch. While some will want to see who wins, others will care less about the medal tally and  more about witnessing what crazy shit Aurelien Giraud decides to ghetto bird over – or into. But that’s not the only side event that’ll capture our attention during the games. Here are a few more things to look out for: Gotta Catch ’Em All Unfortunately, at the same time as the Olympics there’s also a bit of a pandemic running through society… You might have heard about it. In the lead up to the games, a…

Fortunately, this interview wasn’t recorded for a podcast or radio show because there was a distracting amount of background noise crackling through Noah Nayef’s phone line. Noah was riding a Sydney train when he picked up my call, travelling from his family home in Bass Hill to UPS, the inner-city skate shop, before making his merry way over to the new skatepark at Glebe. I could hear announcements blasting over the loudspeakers at the train station, and then, towards the end of the call, the crunchy white noise of wheels on asphalt as he skated down the street towards Central Park Mall. Noah has grown from a little Monster Skatepark grom to a potential Olympic hopeful to a pure street skateboarder – held in high regard as one of the…

Connor, where are you from, and how did you get into skateboarding? I’m originally from Medowie, where Rowan Davis is from. But my family moved to Fern Bay about eight years ago. It’s all right there, pretty quiet. We just got our own little skatepark and it’s only a five-minute skate from my house. It’s pretty dope. When I was 11 or 12, a group of my friends from school had been skating for a bit, so I got a board. I had to wear this blue helmet for the first two years and people would give me shit for it. Mumsy hated me skating without it. One time I got caught without it on and she got pretty mad. I wasn’t allowed to skate for two weeks. I wore…

It’s incredible how nostalgic skaters can be. We talk endlessly about tricks and spots and the skaters who have contributed to the history of skateboarding. This tendency to self-mythologise plays out in all sorts of ways, from re-watching old videos to telling stories about pro skaters’ antics to visiting famous spots in unfamiliar cities, sometimes just to look at them. Skaters have always been good at documenting our collective history and paying homage to the pioneers who came before – mostly through video and photography. But for some, the history of skateboarding is appreciated through hardgoods. Collecting boards has become massively popular over the past decade. The average skate collector skews a little older – in many cases he’s a bloke over 40 who’s looking for mementos of his youth…

It’s a rainy day in Sydney when I catch Sam Fairweather on the phone for a chat. He has the day off from his job at a Paddington bottle-o, and he’s chilling at his new place in Sydenham, which is just near the skatepark. “Sammske” moved to Sydney from the Central Coast a few months ago with his girlfriend, Lyric, and he’s digging life in the big smoke. Between his ACAB toe tattoo, his love of “crazy screaming music”, and his bizarre habit of eating pasta in the shower, it’s clear that Sam doesn’t seek approval or get too swept up in fads or trends. He does his own thing, in his own way, with his own style. This also applies to his skateboarding. With an eclectic bag of tricks…

20 years old. LIVES IN Caulfield, Melbourne. SPONSORS: PD Distribution (Heroin and Satori), Butter (Flow) and Hemley Skateboarding. “Izaak already has a great eye and heaps of power. Given that his eye will only become more finely honed, and his power will no doubt develop exponentially, the mind boggles when it comes to trying to fathom Izaak’s potential. He is quite the addition to our squad and will be surprising the masses for decades to come” – Morgan Campbell  “I met Izaak through Instagram in late 2018. He reached out and showed love, so I told him he should come to the city and skate with us. He didn’t have much footage online, but from his goofy park footage at ‘Naz’ Park (Balnarring) – I could tell he had some serious…