Inner City Kickers UK edition, Max Mania / Red Bull Air and Water / Board X 1998
Hey Y’all,
Todays little doozie is another piece of snowboard history from the late 90’s,' 98 to be precise and is a quick fire clips of three of the ol’ Inner City kicker competitions that were all the rage back then while snowboarding was still growing and everyone involved in the sport wasn’t scrabbling for the same dollar, anyway that's another rant for another day but for now we’ll stick to the point, Inner city snowboarding, The events featured in this piece were “Max Mania” from Manchester / Red Bull “Air and Water” London Docklands and “Board X” which took place at Battersey park London. Today the only events in this vein are the massive money spinners of X-Games and the now owned by "Sean White PLC inc” the Air and Style. But on a more positive note, during that time in snowboardings short history, I witnessed on many an occasion, a large portion of the riders get together and agree that if anyone who signed up for it, won the competition, they would split the prize money between all the riders and instead of competing against each other they would just jam, have fun, gee the crowd up and get pissed on the prize purse. some of you may be thinking “but they wouldn't be competing so the snowboarding wouldn't be as good”. well I’m here to tell you that it was brilliant, this was a genius way for the riders to take a certain amount of control over the way the event played out and create their own "vibe". The crowd were blissfully unaware of this agreement. The atmosphere was right up there, the riders were free to pull whatever tricks they felt like,or whatever pleased the crowd (usually back flips due to most of the crowd being clueless about snowboarding ) instead of whatever the highest scoring trick of the week was deemed to be, and they just jammed, got pissed and enjoyed the night, kinda like snowboarding was meant to be!
The soundtrack was very kindly supplied by a band called "A" who I met back then at one of the skate comps, and who were on warner bros at the time it's a track from their debut album 'How ace are buildings' I think I cant be 100% on that but it prob a close guess.
anyways enough of my bullshit here’s the clip,
oh yeah! and the Riders were — James Stentiford / Freidl Kolar / Max Plotzeneder / Nando Plotzeneder / Stuart Brass / Thomas “Beckna” Eberhartner / Darius Heristchian / Danny Wheeler /Jamie Phillp / Steve Bailey / Timothy Warwood (of Olympic commentary fame, haha Priceless, go Timmy) / Andy Crawford / Thomas Johansen / Nicky Guewrrero Vert skating / Mark Hartley / Gian Simmen 1st snowboarder to win the Olympics (I’m with Terje on that one, say no more ) / Youboi Ahmed / David Vincent / Garry Chevalier mini ramp / Mike Manzoori mini ramp (ATM flick by Mike Manzoori was the skate movie that made me want to make movies ) /Pat Meurier / Darren Cingel / Mary Schumaker /Jocke Olson Vert / Maius Sommer / Ben Hinkley and finally Duncan Carr with a belly slide, rolly polly to fakie.
ENJOY!
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