Janne Saario
October 20, 2008 @ 9:20 AM
Skateboarding loves to categorise and pigeonhole. Whole careers and the people behind them get reduced to a style of skating or even just a single trick. The guy who did the ollie. That dude who skates weird banks. The guy with the quick feet. The handrail guy, the switch flip guy, the bowlriding backside smith person. We all do this to others, yet we don’t like it one bit when we get labelled like that ourselves.
Janne Saario has had his fair share of pigeonholing done to his name. Ever since he made his first appearance on the Finnish scene in the late 90’s all the way to his recent video parts in Element, Neighbours and DVS videos, he’s been known to enjoy his manuals. But here’s the extraordinary thing: While many of the miniramp chaps and the handrail dudes spend a lot of time trying to convince us they can do other stuff, Janne has never felt the need to fight against the category that the skateboard community stuck him in. Part of the reason is that after all these years and for all the sponsorship deals, he’s still to this day skating for himself and having fun doing it. Whatever the rest of us make of his skating is secondary to him. My guess is that the other reason is that he’s so good at what he does. So why deny it, right? Meet the man behind the manual; here’s Janne.
It’s the beginning of the summer right now, do you have any plans?
I’m doing a tour with DVS now in June and then I’m off to the middle of Finland for a month. My girlfriend has a job in the Central Hospital there for July, so we’ll just be hanging out, skating with my son. Rest of the summer I’ll be filming for the new Element Europe video.
You know the town from before?
Yeah, our summer place is just around the corner from Jyväskylä. So we can head there on the weekends, have a sauna by the lake, and then spend weekdays in the centre of town.
Your girlfriend is studying to be a doctor. Didn’t you act as a guinea-pig for her recently on some surgery course?
They were practicing removing moles and I thought it would be nothing, that they’d just jerk it off somehow. We were supposed to be finishing this interview at the same time as well…so I’m there and she’s digging into my back and her professor’s telling her to keep going deeper until she could see some yellow layer of fat tissue about a centimetre in. She had to stitch it up and I couldn’t skate for ten days.
Does every student have to persuade a friend that they can operate on?
Yeah, a friend or a relative! They take turns and everyone else is watching.
Have you done any more assisting for her studies?
Not really…she’s practised some stuff with my eyes before, like flipping them around or something. And they’ve practiced stuff with needles in the college, like inserting cathedra-tubes for drips and stuff. But I didn’t take part in that. She would return home with her arms all bruised up after they’d been poking needles into each other, looking for veins. And when they couldn’t find the vain, they’d end up zigzaggin inside the arm, piercing tiny little holes all over the vein. But what can you do, you have to practice that.
Don’t they have like…patients for that?
She was going to get a drumstick or some chicken to practice the stitching on, but then she didn’t have time for it so she just went at it on my back.
How are your own studies coming along?
Pretty slowly but steady. They try to make you get out of there in five years, but that’s pretty ambitious. I think I’ve got about three or four years left, and three behind me.
You’re going to be a landscape architect. How does that differ from plain old architects?
You don’t really design houses, you design public spaces, park areas, private gardens and all kinds of outdoor spaces.
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