Nashville, Tennesee - June 18th, 2000
Have you ever wanted to create chaos at an X-Trials event? It's actually not as hard as you might expect. That is at least if you can control the weather. Picture your typical Saturday morning at the X-Trials. The inline practice session is underway on the street course and everything is going fine, as long as Aaron Feinberg keeps his helmet on.About ten minutes before the prelims are supposed to begin, clouds move in and it proceeds to dump rain for well over an hour.

The skaters clear the course and speed off to points unknown and the judges head back to the hotel. A few of us decide to stay around, just in case the rain stops and we can get the competition underway. Entertaining ourselves with the presidential fitness challenge and assorted stupid human tricks, we find that none are of us are in the shape that we pretend to be.To our surprise the rain stops and our flicker of hope begins to grow, only to be put out by a new surge of rain. Our entertainment continues until the rain stops again. Having learned from our mistakes, we contact the weather service to confirm the stoppage and proceed to help dry off the street course.

It is now nearing the hour of seven and we have only a short time before darkness overtakes us to run the prelims. The judges were summoned, and show up about 20 minutes later. Due to the time constraints the judges decide to run a one-run only prelim. This would lead to an atypical final, since those skaters who usually have trouble putting together two runs, now have an equal shot at making the finals. As darkness set in we finished up the last of the runs and prepared for another night out in Nashville.

Sunday morning rolled around and it was time to head back to the site. Only to find out that it had rained again early that morning and pushed the entire schedule for the day back several hours. This didn't look good, flights were going to be missed, and in fact Randy Spizer couldn't compete in the finals because he had a plane to catch. Even some of the judges looked like they were going to miss their flights if things didn't start soon.

After sitting through the finals of Skateboard Street, things finally got underway. Morgan Peszko ended up in 9th place after being absent for his first run. Nick Riggle took the 8th spot easily with the most creative line of the day, including a great farvegnugen up the grind box. Pat Lennen took the 7th spot with another creative line. Sam Fogarty worked hard to impress his girlfriend, but was only able to grab 6th place with tricks like a huge bio 540 and a disaster mistrial over the launch box.

The always present Mike Budnik again made the top five with his amazing consistency and a fakie 720 over the spine. A fishbrain down the startbox planter and a big laid out flip off one of the launches were just two of the many tricks that gave Santiago Azpurua the 4th spot. Aaron Feinberg made another appearance in the competition circuit and skated well enough to get third place. A big 360 over the gap and into the quarter pipe to start his run is just the kind of thing we have grown to expect from Aaron. Jaren Grob had to wait out a brief shower in order take his second run, but it paid off. Jaren was able to skate to the second spot with a 360 to soul on the highest wall on the course and even attempting a huge disaster true spin topside pornstar over the launch box. For the fourth week in a row, Sven Boekhorst walked away with the win. Nobody has been able to match the high levels of technicality and consistency that Sven puts into his run. Only time will tell if Sven can keep up with the pace he had set for himself.

The women had to put up with the rain as well in Nashville, but skated as well as ever. The newest pro on the Women's Tour, Deborah West, skated extremely well, despite taking the hardest fall of everyone that weekend, to take the fourth spot. Stephanie Tolle, from Plano, TX and Angela Araujo from Curitiba-Parana, took the 3rd and 2nd spots respectively. Coming off her 3rd place finish in vert the day before, Fabiola da Silva skated as well as ever to add yet another win to her street record.

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