So I’ve got this friend who called me up a month before Christmas and with a dubious story about building a vert ramp for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Let’s call him “Gordo”, because that’s what his name is. I was a bit skeptical to say the least. It seemed a little bit too close to the event to not have important details like this worked out.
Things Gordo says he’s knee deep in while maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA at a college that he has still never told us the name of… (According to Dr. Brad)
- Designing “medical equipment”
- Designing mountain bike components for some company that he wouldn’t tell me the name of.
- Full sponsorship from (who else?) Alva and Vans following his pro division contest runs at this summers Warped Tour (when I asked how the bands sounded he replied “what bands?”)
- Designing and manufacturing skateboard helmets
Note: Brad and I got in a lot of trouble with Gordo for that last part. Gordo, it’s all in good fun! We swear!
I’m unemployed. It sucks. I have no money. I’ve been unemployed since shortly before the September 11 attacks. As New Year’s Eve approaches, this long shot is starting to look better and better until I am actually depending on it. To my knowledge, Gordo has only built one skateboarding facility, and I’ve seen it. It’s a pretty good little park in Pekin Il.* As an interesting side note, as recently as the last decade the Pekin High School team name was the “Pekin Chinks”, as in Peking China. The Pekin park is fun from as far as I can tell. I tried to skate it the day after a wedding reception. We got kicked out after 15 minutes for not having wrist guards of all things. If it weren’t for a car wreck of a hangover coupled with temperatures in the high 90’s and oppressive humidity we would probably would have put up more of a fight. So, yeah! Let’s go build a ramp in SLC. I talk it over with Grover and we do some risk assessment. End result: Send us two plane tickets and we’re there. What follows is our odyssey.
Start the journey…
* Actually, Gordo has successfully built several large ramps for trade shows and demos accross the country. He also served in an advisory capacity for some major concrete parks as well. I didn’t know that at the time. He’s got a degree in Industrial Design. And when you get right down to it, Brad is often times full of it.
