http://mpora.com/videos/hXlnvm5kf Last weekend Lucy Adams helped organise a girls miniramp jam as part of the Paddle Around The Pier festival, down in Hove. With a promise of sun, sand and sea, the day was set to be a corker. Although that was until we hit the M25…for those not in the know this is the motorway that circles London, and was aptly referred to as the ‘Road to Hell’ in a song by Chris Rea. Basically the road is just one long traffic jam! On a good day you can do the journey from London to Brighton in 1 hour and 30 minutes. However because the sun was out, every man and his dog apparently also wanted to make their way down to the south coast to dip their toes in the sea, so the journey ended up taking 3 hours!
By 2.50pm we were still not at the festival site and the comp was due to start at 3pm. Nerves were getting a little fraught, other riders has got lost and parking availability was abysmal. In the end doing what any other person would do – we gave up on trying to find that elusive free parking space, which admittedly was somewhere 5 miles out from the festival site anyway – got as close as we could (in this case across the road) and paid the extortionate ‘I could have bought a house for that’ parking fees.
By 3.05 Lucy had got all the riders together and the 45-minute ‘girls only’ jam began. Although the focus was to film Lucy’s for STS, there were other good tricks going down from the other riders present – namely Rogue riders Emma Richardson (ollie to crooked grind revert in, frontside 5.0 pop in) and Helen Lovelee (frontside 50.50 frontside lipslide and backside disaster). Lucy was all over the ramp landing a whole host of tricks – tweaked ollie fakies and fakie ollies, 50.50 fakie, boardslide fakie and smith grinds.
Part of the focus of the event was for Lucy to encourage younger riders to get involved. Two local young girls – Kiki and Tamsin – initially were a little nervous about riding the ramp especially with such a big crowd looking on.However after watching the older girls throwing down trick after trick they became more than keen to have a go.
With Lucy’s encouragement both learnt to drop on the 4-foot ramp and 6 foot extension.
Check out the video below to catch some of the skating that went on that day and to hear Lucy talking more in depth about how the event came about
