I woke up early on Friday to meet up with DC rider Chad Dickson before we made our way to the Vancouver Airport. It‘s always good to do a trip with chad, he’s always mellow and goes with the flow and is up for anything. Chad and Josh Clark would be on the judging panel for this stop on the tour.
We were on our way to Winnipeg for our first stop on the DC Nationals city qualifier. I would later learn many fun facts about “the Peg” such as; Winnipeg is the Slurpee capital of the world. The citizens of the city frozen 6 months of the year, consume an estimated 400,000 Slurpees per month in Winnipeg. This includes the frigid winter months, Interesting considering we saw no slurpees or slurpee machines the whole trip.
We were treated to some Hollywood blockbusters for our in flight movie that made the 2 ½ hour flight go by quite quickly, so quick that our movie was stopped before it ended, so I still have no idea what happens to Chung Li in the new Street fighter movie. Does she get revenge for her father’s ruthless murder by the evil cold-hearted Bison? Does she turn to the dark side and take over the streets of Bangkok? I do not know, and I am quite the movie buff and pride myself on my knowledge in this area, I was surprised to learn that Chad was also a big movie buff and we finished the flight sharing our expertise in this field.
Once in Winnipeg we met up with fellow DC rider Josh Clark who flew out from Montreal. Josh is always good to see, always happy and energetic. Josh also impressed us all on this trip by eating everything that was on his plate and anything Chad or I could not finish.
We checked into the luxurious Hampton of Winnipeg where we dropped off our bags and headed right out the door to go skate the Forks Plaza. This Place is huge and is one of the best skate plazas that newline skate parks have created so far. If you have the opportunity to go to Winnipeg and have any interest at all in skateboarding or architecture you have to go the Forks, this place is a skater’s heaven and an amazing piece of architecture.
We got up early and made our way over to Sk8 skates to meet up with Genico. Genico was our gracious host for the weekend; he and his staff were on hand all day to help us out with the contest. At 9:00am there were already kids at the park skating and getting hyped for the contest. We saw a lot of good skating go down during warm up and the contest was looking like it would be a good session.
The sun was blazing hot and my pasting white skin was baked, but only on my right side, my other side still looks like powder, not cool. I don’t know how these guys skated all day in the heat. A lot of spectators showed up and braved the heat as well, one guy barged the course and started charging towards the 10 stair, we didn’t really know what was going on but everyone cleared out of his way and he hucked a front flip down the stairs landing on his feet and running away with out missing a beat.
There was some good skating in the single runs and the jam sessions. The jam sessions were 4 minutes per heat and everyone fed off each other and really got the crowd behind them. After we wrapped up the runs the finals were set to start. The top five in the finals were: Josh Thorvaldson, Eric Milinkovic, Adam Lecker, Kyle Nickoshie and Jamie Mospanchuck.
After two runs, it was real close between Jamie and Adam who both had difficult and consistent runs, but in the end, it was Jamie who put down a flawless final run and took the first place spot and won a trip to Vancouver for the finals in August. His last Nollie flip down the big three had everyone on there feet in anticipation of a make, his board flipped so slow that we were all sure he couldn’t catch it, but he did and stomped it super clean, the crowd went nuts! Jamie stayed calm and rolled away with ease.
We had a best trick contest that went down after the finals, many tricks went down, it was hard to keep track of them all, we did call out $100.00 for the first backside nose blunt or Kick flip crook down the big hubba, there were no takers. Kyle Nickoshie had a few tries but we never saw it go down. Check out Push.ca for the video of the contest and the best trick. Thanks to Sk8 Skate’s and the City of Winnipeg , we will see you in Calgary at the Cochrane skate park on June 27th.
Final Standings
- Jamie Mospanchuck
- Adam Lecker
- Kyle nichoshie
- Eric Milinkvic
- Josh Throvaldson