Slam Skateboarding 233 Autumn 2022

The progression of skateboarding remains as thrilling and fluid as ever. Fads and trends of tricks come and go, but whenever things become a little stagnant, a handful of creative cats who think outside the box pull through with the unfathomable. They can shake up the scene and influence the entire landscape of skateboarding. The latest rattle of the cage comes from the savage beasts who have taken to handrail hopping. We’ve all done it: looked at the most ridiculous rails and imagined if so-and-so gapped from this to that. Well, the veil has been lifted, and a new movement has begun. I might be wrong, but I feel like Mark Gonzales was the first to try a decent transfer from rail to rail in Real’s ’99 release, Kicked Out Of Everywhere.…

It had been pissing down all weekend, but I wasn’t too worried. While my girlfriend was scrolling the local community Facebook page, warning me of the impending danger, I offered hollow reassurances. “We’ll be right. The water won’t come up overnight. We’ll check again in the morning.” But I was wrong. It was just after 2am when she woke me and told me our back studio was about to go under water. We frantically moved furniture into the main house, which is three steps higher than the studio. I spent the next few hours stashing valuables in high cupboards, packing supplies for our eight-month-old son and maniacally refreshing the BOM radar. By 10am the next day, the water was lapping at the back door. The SES rocked up and said…

A lot of the skaters you see in the pages of Slam started skating in a different time. Shoes were fatter, boards were thinner, and the world made a little more sense. Amidst all the chaos we’ve seen in the past couple of years – pandemics, Trump, Russian invasions, floods and fires – many Australian skateboarders have become fathers, and in the process, brought a little bit of balance back into what is otherwise a very crazy time to be alive. Nothing puts things into perspective more than having a child. I found this out firsthand when my beautiful fiancé, Nicole, gave birth to our son, Billy, on Christmas Day. He’s absolutely perfect and has completely changed my outlook on life, priorities, and skateboarding. But rather than going on and on…

Rob Pace’s path to Australian SOTY was as eventful and productive as any. Two genuinely heavy video parts stacked full of groundbreaking tricks, a solid sprinkling of footage across several additional projects, and a constant stream of photo coverage in magazines made it difficult to argue against Rob’s achievement. What’s interesting about Rob’s accolade, much like the three or four most recent SOTYs, is that he earned his spot almost entirely through coverage and achievements on home soil, via locally produced videos and media. Historically, Slam SOTY tended to be awarded to Australians who’d had breakout years overseas, usually with major US-produced video parts and coverage in US magazines – think of big international heavyweights like Shane O’Neill, Dane Burman, or Chima Ferguson – because in order to be culturally relevant…

The day before he was crowned our Australian SOTY, Rob Pace was planning to drive four hours to go skating in Canberra. He tried to convince Riely Walker and Brendan Gardoll that they should all trek it down to the ACT, since rain was predicted for Sydney. Riely and Brendan, his photographer and filmer respectively, ignored Rob’s texts, then took him to skate a kinked rail in Sydney in the rain, before coercing him to his SOTY surprise at Federal Park. That was when Rob’s homies ran out to spray him with champagne and he copped the gold SOTY cup. “I was in disbelief,” said Rob. “I had absolutely no idea.” The past year has proven that Rob is among Australia’s most talented, driven and prolific skateboarders. He put out four…

Kieran Woolley’s New Gen, which featured in the Autumn Edition of 2021, was mostly shot on a single trip up the East Coast of Australia. Getting tricks in Melbourne, Canberra, the Gold Coast and Brisbane, Kieran introduced himself as a hungry all-terrain skater, annihilating a healthy mix of skateparks, DIYs and street spots. Many of these tricks would be seen in his Indy part, which dropped later in the year. At the time, Kieran was a 17-year-old kid from Minnamurra, on the South Coast of NSW, doing home-schooling in order to prioritise a constantly changing schedule of skate comps. At that point, it looked like Kieran might have a chance of qualifying for the men’s park skateboarding category of the Olympics, though due to COVID, no one was really sure…