|
Nashville,
Tennesee - June 16th, 2000
Nashville, Tennessee, the land of country music and the
king was the setting for the fourth and final X-Trials of
the season and gave us the one thing that had been missing
at the previous three stops, weather. All of the previous
stops had been great, with nothing but blue skies and sun.
Nashville was ready to show us what happens to an event
when Mother Nature isn't in the best of moods. The vert
comp was held on Friday, which turned out to be the nicest
of all the days, the one thing that the skaters had to deal
with was the wind. A lot of wind to be exact. As you can
imagine, wind is not a vert skater's best friend. As it
turned out only 17 vert skaters showed up to the event,
so it was decided that only a final would be held and the
best of two runs would determine the winner. Due to the
high winds, the skaters relied more on their technical tricks,
rather than choosing to go big and be blow all over the
ramp.
It was Matt
Salerno who came out on top with his ability to fit more
tricks into a run then anyone else on the ramp. Every trip
up the wall was a trick. Matt even but
in his big 900 spin for good measure, showing that it could
be done even in the high winds. Mike Budnik took home second
place by staying consistent, which seemed to be the key
to success in Nashville. The big story of the day surrounded
the third place skater, who had a great day. Throwing a
big 720, sticking super solid fishbrains all day, and finally
landing a 540 flat spin, Fabiola da Silva was able to not
only take first in the women's competition, but she was
the first women to ever stand on the podium in a men's vert
competition.
Earning himself
a trip to the X-Games, Marco de Santi from Sao Paulo, Brazil
took home fourth place, followed closely behind by Cesar
Mora in fifth, who ran into a rare bad day. Sven Boekhorst,
who had been red hot on street and becoming equally as impressive
on vert, seemed to have a little trouble with some of his
super technical tricks, but was still able to come away
in 6th place. Sam Fogarty and Viorel Popa actually tied
their scores, but Viorel missed his first run and had to
concede 7th place to Sam and settle for 8th. Andre
Englehart, the older of the two Englehart brothers skated
to a 9th place finish, while his brother Marc ended up in
13th. Jaren Grob finished off the top ten. Shane Yost had
a surprising finish in 14th place, he was having a lot of
trouble landing his extremely technical spins, but when
your throwing tricks as hard as Shane's, you can't always
be perfect.
Manuel Billiris,
Paul Malina, Ryan Dawes, who barely made it to the ramp
in time to take his second run, Toby Heslop and Randy Marino
all faced the gale force winds to fill out the rest of the
field in Nashville.

Click
here to check out Street.
|