News From Osiris

On their recent trip to SLC for the Dew Tour, Josh Betley, Marcus Tooker, and Ronnie Napolitan hit a few cement parks in the area. Watch it!

Check out Vital BMX’s video from the Goods BMX Kings of Crete Jam. Ben Hucke has a few rad clips in this including a can can nosewheelie. That’s innovation!

Shuriken only has one trick in this clip, but oh how sick it is. Check it!

Tony Mag and Allysha Bergado ventured up north to the great skatepark of Lake Cunningham in San Jose, California. This was the site for the 11th annual Tim Brauch Memorial contest. Neither the veteran T-Mag nor the upstart protégé AB had skated the park before, so it was a tall task to show up the day before the contest and figure out lines and dial tricks in a pool that also had 30 other skaters doing the same thing. On top of that, it was also close to 100 degrees in San José over the weekend. AB wasn’t as affected by the heat as the old dog T-Mag, who only skated a couple of hours on Saturday.

Because the girls contest practice started real early on Sunday morning, T-Mag and AB showed up at the park at 8.30, which turned out to be a good call, since it wasn’t very hot then and not really crowded either. T-Mag was slow to get ready so by the time he was skating, the session was already fired up with girls, masters and pro’s, all trying to do their thing in the famous keyhole pool with a setback shallow end.

The girls were up first at 10.30 or so and Allysha had really put together her stuff well and ended doing 3 ft. backside and frontside airs on the face wall, super clean inverts and even threw in a switch stance air at the end, one of T-Mag old claims to fame in the early 80’s. While there was plenty of female talent, it looked like AB might end up on top, but she ended with second place, just barely bested by X Games champ Lyn-Z Adams, who took the top honors, with Priscilla Lee taking third.

Then it was time for the grandmasters pre qualifications, which consisted of Steve Caballero, who is a long time San Jose local, Christian Hosoi, who won the event last year, Tony Mag, Lord Salba, Master Of Disaster Duane Peters, Josh Nelson, Mark Partian and about 20 other local rippers, who all knew the bowl well. Christian didn’t have to qualify for the final, there was only five spots for the rest of the field, so competition was fierce. To T-Mag’s surprise, he qualified second, after Cabbie, along with Salba, Partain and Nelson.

Unfortunately, during practice, Duane managed to take a slam so hard, that he dislocated his left leg out of the hip socket and had to be carted off on an emergency stretcher.

Later in the afternoon, after 8 heats of pro qualifications, it was time for the grand master final. The heat had died down a bit, enough to keep everyone pumped. The final was every bit as exciting as you might imagine, with Cabbie taking long, strong and well put together runs, showing his mastery of pool skating, while having the advantage of being the local. Christian is about as exciting as he ever was, also taking great looking runs, with plenty of Hosoi patented aerial maneuvers. T-Mag also put together some great runs, with plenty of aerial attacks, frontside inverts, ollies and what not. In the end T-Mag banged out a crystal clean rodeo on the face wall amongst loud screams and cheers and Hosoi did a couple of face high backside airs to end the whole thing. The pool has a couple of hips that required some time to dial in to be usable for competition runs and T-Mag was a bit short on unique lines and using the hips so in the end it was Cab on top, followed by Hosoi and T-Mag taking third.

A strange thing happened right after the grand master final, as the pro’s warmed up for their final; more than half crowd left. While there weren’t top pro names present, there were a slew of really amazing riders certainly worth watching in what turned out to be a super exciting final. Later, someone said that happened last year too, that most people came for the grandmaster event. That made some sense, since I saw T-Mag constantly get stopped by people that wanted to talk to him about old school skating, Osiris, H-Street, history, his skating, places they saw him skate in the past and on and on. I was quite refreshing to see a So Cal rider get so much support from a Nor Cal crew and I know that T-Mag was super stoked on that, as well as having placed well in the event, though he was probably even more stoked to see AB come so close to winning.

Colt Fake has a bike check up on Dig’s site. Check it out! There’s a crazy sequence on there that you don’t want to miss.