DEW TOUR BREAKS RECORD
Salt Lake was the largest stop yet on the Dew Tour. Nearly 62,000 turned out to watch hundreds of skateboarders, BMX and FMX riders (FMX: Freestyle Motocross, 'X' always means 'cross') riders do amazing flips and tricks.
These are sports played in the air. Imagine freestyle skiing, but with a 20-inch bike, a motorcycle, a skateboard. They use kickers and halfpipes to launch, and the tricks they do during the few seconds of airtime defy the laws of physics. These are the big sports of the future. As football fades, skateboard ascends.
Though there's still the October finals in Orlando, Fla., three Dew Cup overall winners were decided at the Utah stop. Shaun White won vert (halfpipe) skateboard, Nate Adams won the FMX Cup and Ryan Scheckler took the cup for Skate park.
In FMX, the motorized riders dropped down from a near vertical start gate to a dirt course of jumps and rollers where they twisted and turned in the air like their bikes were a part of their body. Adams, like the other winners, has been so dominant that no one else was ever even in contention.
The events were held at the Energy Solutions Arena, home of the Utah Jazz. Down the street from the huge building is an empty city block, used as a parking lot. The entire block was covered with dirt to make the FMX course and the most important event, a BMX supercross, which was to be an Olympic qualifier. It brought riders in from all over the world, 88riders, 20 countries.
Salt Lake has been bone dry for most of the summer, but during the FMX finals, it began sprinkling. Then the clouds began dumping, buckets of rain, waterfalls of rain. Organizers tried to line the course with plastic, but it was no use. A city block of carefully built jumps turned to mud. The BMX supercross Olympic qualifier was canceled. Athletes who had flown in from Europe just for that event stood around in wordless shock, staring out of the tents as the rain continued to pour down.
Skateboard park, the only other outdoor event, was also canceled, though it was rescheduled for the next day because NBC was televising the contest. Park has its own huge star.
Ryan Sheckler is the biggest name you never heard of; dominating the sport of skateboard park, while starring in his own, very popular reality show. His ability to skate fast through a dune-ish desert of wooden quarter pipes, flat table tops and slanted ramps while doing flips, twists, somersaults, and spins, has made him more than a rock star, with male fans of all ages and female groupies just waiting for the chance.
But the biggest phenom---and enigma---in action sport is Shaun White, winner of Olympic gold in snowboard halfpipe, winner of 12 medals at the X Games, including seven golds in snowboarding slopestyle and superpipe, and another gold in skateboard vert. He is the only athlete to dominate and medal in both summer and winter sports.
White, who burst onto the world stage with a mop of long red hair, was nicknamed the "Flying Tomato," a name he is mightily tired of. Now he has a new nickname: the Led Zeppelin fan has now been dubbed after his fave group with the name, 'Red Zeppelin."
He says of his new name, "I love it!"
White has a problem not really of his own making: his fame makes him a target in many ways. At the Dew vert contest, press cameras ignored athletes in the middle of their runs to watch White's every twitch. He tried in obvious ways to turn the attention to other skateboarders, loudly banging the nose of his board on the deck of the pipe, the traditional skateboarder's applause. But no, the cameras stayed strictly on Red Zep. The crush of press made him nervous and twitchy. The man whose feet are a magnet for his board drew gasps when he lost his board on two of his three runs.
Though he came in third at the Salt Lake stop, that, with his accumulated points from his wins at the last three stops, made him the overall vert winner.
As the leader, he was the last to drop in for each of the three runs. At the end, he sat on his board in the tranny (flat bottom of the pipe) waiting for the results. He said of winner Pierre Luc Gagnon, “I think his run was solid. But it just makes me tougher for next year. The biggest thing is to get past qualifiying, ‘cause that’s such a high pressure thing.
White wears his emotions on his face, and it's easy to see he just wants to perform, and is getting tired the distracting fame. He is still deciding whether he will even show up for the final Orlando Dew stop.
There is a different consciousness to action sport athletes. Example: Scott Cramner, BMX Park. He won big. He won $15,000. None of that mattered to him. All he cared about was landing a front flip tailwhip; which is a front somersault done high in the air while off the bike, holding on to the handlebars and spinning the bike around the handlebars before sitting back on the seat and landing. He finally landed it on his final run.
"Winning is nice, but the only thing that mattered to me was landing that front flip tailwhipe. Winning was just a bonus. The trick was more important. If I hadn't won, I could walk away from this competition okay because I landed a new trick in competition," Cranmer said.
After his run, the other riders threw their helmets into the park as a way of showing approval.
Still, those who looked closely could see that winning did matter to Cranmer. As he sat on his bike beside the park, he pulled up and pushed down the tab of his water bottle over and over while waiting to see if he had won. Cameras surrounded him as everyone waited for the scores. When his name was announced, he got up off his bike, on which he had been sitting, took a drink and looked around, a smile of relief on his face. Then it all washed over Cranmer---the cameras, the people, the screams---he blinked, as if the reaction overwhelmed him. He picked up his bike and walked out, leaving the acclaim behind.
One rider was not happy about his result, and made no bones about it. Daniel Dhers, who had qualified first in the BMX park preliminaries, had incredible speed and air, but didn't even place.
The South American rider didn't try to hide his disappointment, saying in his accented English, "I think I did a bunch of tricks that nobody else do, that were really hard. I don’t agree with the judges. I guess I have to try even harder. I have no idea why I didn’t make the podium, my consistency, my airs, I think I do hard tricks, I don’t know why I got that result."
As the four days of airplay came to an end, competitors came up to the sixth floor athlete's lounge, where there had been unlimited free food, free custom made smoothies and free massages available for the entire Dew event. It's an extremely well run competition, and like similar such comps, will only get bigger.
Outside, tractors and bulldozers were flattening the wet dirt that covered a city block to a depth of 12 feet and hauling it away. By the time the awards and the checks were all given out, the former FMX moto and BMX supercross site was nothing but asphalt.