SLC Olympic Village skate demo

Editor’s Note: Here’s another one I almost decided not to re-post. The photos are embarrassingly bad. They are in fact scans of 35mm prints from Walgreens. I actually had an early digital camera, but the resolution was low, the optics crappy, and in general, they weren’t good for action shots. Even the still shots had compression artifacts. The whole thing is kind of mediocre, but again, I decided not to shy away from past mistakes, so here it is again for the sake of history and continuity. Originally published in April or so of 2002. This feature goes way back to the days of static HTML. The pictures are tiny because everyone had small screens and modems back in those days. Enjoy. K.ed – 3/8/14

The Setup: Ice Village Demo

Did you read the article about building a vert ramp for the SLC Olympics? Come on, did you wade through all 17 pages? Probably not. What is so interesting about building the damn thing if you don’t actually get to skate it? Somebody got to skate it. I went back to SLC to check out the pro demo and take pictures.

The Pitch

After sitting around on my ass for a week or so on returning, I decided to write to some of the magazines to try and get them to pay for my return trip to SLC in exchange for a story and some photos. Below is the email I sent out to Thrasher, Big Brother, and Strength:

Gentlemen,

Send me to the Olympics to take pictures and interview pro-skaters. I was recently hired by a pal to help him build a large vert ramp for the Ice Village at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. I kept a rather humorous (at least to me) journal and took some digital pics of the process.

Reasons why this would be a good story for your mag:

• Vert skating is hugely popular. – OK, that’s a lie.
• It’s the middle of winter, and the ramp is outdoors. This will cause the skaters to be uncomfortable and crabby, resulting in hilarious tom-foolery, or at least angry comments, possibly a lot of no-shows.
• It’s the Olympics! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
• You’ll be sending a message to terrorists, since it was (probably) illegal to skateboard under Taliban rule.

Reasons why I’m qualified:

• I did infrequent freelance photography for Thrasher in the mid to late eighties. Kevin Thatcher spoke highly of my work. Actually, he said “Try using a faster shutter speed.”
• You may or may not remember me as the co-editor of the midwest based ‘zine, Skate and Annoy, from the same time period. Both options might be in my favor.
• I have access to free lodging in SLC.
• I actually can take skate photos
• I’m unemployed and often funny.

The Replies

What the fuck? The major mags are a bunch of weenies! I didn’t get any reply from Thrasher, whom I had actually done work for in the past. Nothing! Not even a thanks-but-no-thanks. My other hope was Strength. I had been in email contact with a guy there named Michael. They are (were?) based out of Ohio. I had contacted him about bugs in their web page as well as finding out if the Old Surf Ohio and Cow Skates magnate was involved. I can remember this little kid that the Surf Ohio crew brought to a contest in Illinois. They called him “Mini Shred”, but his name was actually Rob Dyrdek. Yes, it’s true. At 10 or 11 years old he was already better than I was at age 19. Anyway, little did I know that Strength had been absorbed by the maill order company CSS and had abandoned all integrity and appearances of editorial propriety. My contact Michael must have been a victim because he was no longer reachable. Other generic attempts had failed as well.

Suprisingly, I did hear back from Big Brother editor Dave Carnie himself.

you know, i like the idea, but i never send anyone i’ve never worked with before on an assignment. and for that one, i’d like to go do it. who knows if i will. but i’m always interested in freelance submissions. so if you find your way there and do something on it, lemme know. -dave

Not exactly inspiring, but better than nothing. In another suprise, my wife said I should go do it. She got on and looked for tickets. I called Gordo and asked if his offer still stood, and it did. I bought the ticket. In the meantime, Gordo finally got around to reading this story. I guess some guy that I gave my card to had stopped by and made a wisecrack to Gordo. Well, you can guess what hit the fan, but you can’t guess how much of it hit. I spent about an hour and a half on the phone trying to calm Gordon down. Eventually I consented to correct a few misrepresentations and protect some guilty parties in order to save some business relationships. A couple of days went by and I did indeed have a place to stay in SLC once again. Let me just stress how much I am greatful to Gordon and his Wife for puttin me up in SLC. We give him a hard time, but he’s a talented guy. Actually, we give everyone a hard time, including ourselves. Needless to say, when Gordon and Family moved to Portland I was the only person who showed up to unload the truck.

After I returned, I posted some of it online and sent a private link to Dave. His reply:

yeah, i looked quickly and they’re not the greatest photos but i can see using one or two of them with a short story. maybe run it a half page. it doesn’t look like it was that big of a deal and warrants much more, but yeah, it was at the olympics. so, just to cover my ass and get all the legal nonsense out of the way since i don’t know you and i’ve had problems with strangers sending shit in before…i need to be up front…although i’ve said i might run a couple photos and a short story, that does not amount to a gaurantee that i’m going to run anything. because i can’t make a decision until i see the whole thing. and i don’t pay kill fees. and anything you send us is at your own risk. if you want it returned, include a SASE and i’ll be happy to.

I wrote the story and tried and failed to cram it into the 600 word allotment. Eventually, I sent it to him. Since I had delayed in writing it, I sent an email off to Dave asking why he didn’t like the story – BEFORE I actually sent it to him. His quite honest reply was:

yeah, sorry that was awhile ago and i don’t even remember it actually, so i probably wasn’t that into it. not quite silly enough and not quite skateboard worthy. but thanks for sending it. -dave

I forked over the story and confessed that I had never actually sent it to him. He never got back to me, so it’s safe to say that It was indeed not very silly or memorable. I got to caught up in trying to actually provide information about an event that virtually nobody attended – like I was a reporter or something instead of an entertainer. Well, I can’t blame him. Too much time had passed and the photos were pretty crappy. I harbor no ill-will towards Big Brother Magazine other than for the crappy t-shirt I got with my subscription. It’s still the funniest skate mag out there, and the only ones that were polite enought to return my emails. Thrasher even sent banners and stickers to the event for fuck’s sake. You would think they would have at least been curious.

That hasn’t stopped me from trying to peddle it to Juice Magazine. I didn’t send them a blind email in the first place because Neil sent them several emails about purchasing some Juice merchandise. I figured that since they didn’t reply to him and he wanted to give them money, the chances were slim that they’d reply to my email asking them to give me money. Through an incredibly boring tale marginally involving the only actually cute flight attendant that I’ve ever seen, I have in my posession an actual email address at Juice that gets a response. No way. I’m not going to divulge it. I’ll let you know what happens, if anything does, but in the mean time you can read the story or look at the pictures.

It was cold and gray for the most part, and I was freaking out about the flash sync on my camera being broken, but I got some good pics anyway. There is only one bail shot. A couple of them may look sketchy, but they were all makes except for the one obvious one.

Thanks to the locals who picked up the slack and skated hard. These pics are pretty much thrown up there in the order that I took them. Most of the better ones are later on. I also included assorted non-skateboard shots I took at the ice Village. Lots of event dorks and other stuff.