The Trouble With… Banks
August 07, 2006 @ 3:59 PM
Banks are back. No two ways about it. Open any mag printed since the arrival of digital sequences or stick on any old video that’s filmed within the past couple of years, and you’ll get an eye full of them. Not some piece of plywood nailed to a 2 by 4, but the concrete hips and lips and declines and intertwines that Lyon and Barcelona are famous for. I suppose the reason is that they’re incredibly fun to skate. And here’s the magic: You don’t need to be Bastien Salabanzi to have fun on a bank, where as you might not enjoy bs lipsliding 16 stair handrails like he does without his skills.
Almost anything people do on them looks ridiculously easy, no matter how really fucking hard it is in real life.
Which brings us to the real trouble with banks. Almost anything people do on them looks ridiculously easy, no matter how really fucking hard it is in real life. Look at Arto Saari’s sw fs blunt revert on the bank curb in Lyon in Sorry. How hard can that be, right, it’s almost a slappy. Or Jani Peltonen doing a sw popshovit nosegrind fakie in the small bank curb in Barcelona in Hel. Sounds tech, but appears to be a piece of piss. I mean it’s like what, chin high at best. Or what about all those 5-0’s to fakie, or bs tailslide reverts that people have done into the big decline at Fondo? What about Kenny Reed’s fs 5-0 to fakie at NDK in Sofia? It’s not like you need to pop high or jump off a building or anything real dangerous and difficult, is it now? Thing is that most skaters have grown up to think that parks and plywood are wack and streets is where it’s at. And by an extension to that, concrete flatbanks – with or without the added curb factor on top – seem a bit too close to skateparks and therefore aren’t to be taken seriously. Sure they look fun, but they don’t look difficult. If only I had that bank in my town, I’m sure I could do whatever those guys are doing.
Never mistake it for being easy just because it looks easy!
First flaw in that logic is that the bank is not in my town, so in fact I don’t know what the hell I’m on about, do I? Part of the fun and also the difficulty about bank skating is that they don’t grow on every street. So you need to find it first, which might not be an easy task. So next time you catch yourself thinking “I could do that”, the answer is no you couldn’t, because you don’t know where “that” is. Secondly, where as a knee high ledge is a knee high ledge wherever it is, every single bank is different. So if you think you’ve got 5-0’s on lock once you’ve done them on one bank, it’s time to think again when you get to the next one. The other thing is that most of the people you see skating these banks, like Daewon, Brezinski, Puleo, Kenny, Arto, Penny, JB, Puig, Jensen, Eldridge – or whoever it is, doing switch in, revert and shove it out on a tight looking little incline – are so incredibly good that they make anything look piss easy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big drop or a small decline: Never mistake it for being easy just because it looks easy! The only difference is that there’s a humongous set of steps in every town and all of us have stood on top of one shitting our pants. We all know that it’s not easy to skate a double set.
There are a lot of awkward moves involved that require a man to be one with his board and his environment.
So when you do in fact get a chance to try your luck on a small looking but steep concrete bank you’ll realize that in order to ride away from anything you need to redistribute your weight about 90 degrees in a split second, never really knowing which way to lean towards. Besides that, you need to slide on stuff that doesn’t slide, force your trucks to grind through a razor sharp edge of a bank instead of the straight angle of a granite ledge you’re used to. You have to do quick mini manuals into sharp corners and ollie before you really even hit the surface you’re ollieing off of, with no time to set your feet either. There are a lot of awkward moves involved at the twilightzone somewhere in between ollieing, wallieing, sliding and grinding that require a man to be one with his board and his environment. And that, my friend, is what makes bank skating so much fun and also so much more difficult than it looks, viewed from the comfort of your couch.
