AIL 2009 from vossoughi on Vimeo.

Whenever there is a big rollerblading contest within a 3-4 hour drive from your city you feel the need to attend. Throw in the fact you know a ton of your good friends from around the world are gonna be there and there will plenty of shredding, boozing and overall goodtimes…you can’t resist.

With this in mind we didn’t make the official decision to actually go until about 4:30pm on friday. At first we had no vehicle, no people to even fill it if we did have one, and plenty of ‘maybes’. Myself and Rawdog Vossoughi were committed and then soon after Prince Arradondo. We needed one more as it was nearing 6:00pm and we gained up our last member; Jeremy Raff; the Texas transplant who now lives in Davis. He took the train to Berkeley and after many delays we left the bay area at midnight…

We decided we would figure out where we were gonna stay on the way there, since we had sleeping bags and pillows so we could just past out on a soft patch of grass worst comes to worst. When we rolled into Tehatchapi at 4:30am we all agreed to split the 52 dollar hotel room to catch some Z’s for at least a few hours.

We rolled to albertsons to eat a shitty cheap breakfast consisting of Salame, Avacado, apples and a few other gross items. We then went to woodward where kids were already shredding around and many familiar faces showed up every hour as people started to wake up and arrive. Saturday was the Am contest so there was 3 and a half hours of heats and 2 minutes runs filled with sick lines and hammers. During and in between the heats people were shredding the other courses having a great time. In the end Japan pretty much won every division including the girls and 16 and up advanced.

After the contest there was a banquet held at the lodge complete with podium, buffet style dinner, a bar and lots of cheering/clapping/yelling. After myself and Vossoughi were denied food because of our lack of wristband, Mike Garlinghouse came through with a huge pull and got me a wrist band some how. I brought back plenty of food to where we were sitting and sipped on some old man sodas. Ritchie V, Matt Mickey and some other guy who won the year before announced the winners, handed out trophies and free skates to the younger kids. Big ups to Kato and Valo for providing free skates as prizes for kids.

Soon after they had a WRS industry awards which included Rookie and the Year; Julian Cudot, Section of the year; Broski, Skater of the Year; Broski, Team of the Year; Valo. As well as a Hall of Fame Achievement award for Dustin Latimer. His name being announced brought more cheering and clapping then any of the others winner and one could really feel the vibe that Latimer still brings to blading.

After this more boozing and hanging out took place at the lodge soon followed by the bartender telling everyone to leave at around 1:30. About a 100 yard walk later I was asleep on the floor of a room in the lodge, big ups to Victor, Craig, B smith and Pitts for letting us crash.

The next day was the ‘Elite’ division contest followed by a pro jam session. The Contest was insane, complete with french bladers flying all over the course. Julian Cudot laced 450 AO unitys and fakie 7 tru mizous, Alphano bosted 1080’s and Roman did a 900 over huge transfer gap. It was literally like watching a cirque de soliel or something. Every time you looked up there was a french guy who was at least 8 feet in the air, inverted, spinning… Japan again repped hard as Yuto Guto and Soichiro slayed the course with stylish bio 5’s and 450’s. But good ole USA also came hard with Bailes tru fishing and tru topaciding the rainbow box as well as sweaty to 270 topsoul. Andy Jacuzzi laced ill lines all day but had to sit out due to an injury, Chris Smith also laced an ao soyale over the rainbow box and a nice 3 topsoul across it. Miguel Ramos of Puerto Rico shredded some fakie carves and ill lines, one of my favorite bladers. There was no winner in the pro jam contest, instead riders were awarded cash on the spot depending on how hard their trick was or when it was done in the heat.

We however didn’t film too much of this as we we too busy shredding and being stupid. So tune into the edits that pop up and check out this sweet edit with a few rad clips we DID film as well as a great photo set via my iPhone.

-The Governor

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Blade Ripping, lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.