Left: Why skate a tranny when you
can nollie backside 180° over it?
Portugese locals ask themselves
wacky questions like this every day.
Right: Mathias Ringstrom spins a
Cab disaster revert like a traditional
Portugese chicken dancer.
ith his air guitar in hand
and tight rolled pants,
he walked out on the dance
floor like he owned the place"
Lambert was dresed to kill and ready
to rock. With his air guitar in hand
and tight rolled pants, he walked out
on the dance floor like he owned the
place; apparently girls liked it
because he was dancing with them all
night. After all the action at The
Track, it was time to head back and
try to get some sleep. After all, we
had
been
in Portugal for three days
and hadn't skated yet.
Thursday was the first day of the
Expo. Mathias Ringstrom and Sergie
Ventura were flown in just for the
Exxxxtreme Expo vert contest. None
of the guys were feeling too well-
guess after three days of pizza and
alcohol, their bodies were starting to
shut down. The ramps at this place
were designed by rollerbladers for
rollerbladers. The street course was
terrible. They all had bad kinks or
lips; the only thing worth skating was
a quarterpipe c the far end. Lambert
and Pastras still skated like they
owned the place though, hitting every
obstacle possible and doing whatever
it took to make the crowd scream.
Redbull was a major sponsor at the
Expo, so they brought their vert ramp
in, which was really small just like
everything else in this city. It took
them three days to realize it's kind of
hard to have a contest with only three
pros, so instead they had a best trick
contest with a $3500 purse. It took
Ellis (AKA CBS) a while to warm up,
considering he was throwing up pizza
all night, but once he got warmed up
there was no stopping him. Mathias
(AKA Cock Block) had the girls
screaming; he dedicated five back-to-
back 540's to one of the models who
I was walking the catwalk earlier.
These girls were amazing but had no
love for dirtbag skaters like us. Sergie
(AKA Baby Jesus) proved that large
things come in very small packages;
the fact that the ramp was small did-
n't stop him from doing 10 ft-plus
one-footed Japans. So who won the
best trick, you ask? All three of them,
a triple air: Sergie with a huge
with a
method over Ellis doing a frontside
over Mathias doing a tailslide that
was enough to make all the Portugese
women wet their pants. Just like any
trade show, after the third day we
was time to hook up
I were over it.
with some locals and see what
Portugal really had to offer.
were
The next day we needed to find a
local, considering we really didn't
have a tour guide. So we went to a
park called Pedroucos. The park con-
sisted of a 10 ft cement half-pipe and
a couple of whoopty-dos, but the best
thing there was a really steep 3 ft
with no deck that somehow
quarter
Pastras managed to sack his nuts on.
Lambert ollied a huge gap from the
half-pipe to one of the whoopty-dos,
while Ellis and Mathias skated the
vert ramp padless. Eventually we ran
into a local kid by the name of Ivo
Ribeiro. He showed us a couple of
spots around town, including a park
by the name of Oeiras with a cement
bowl connected to a 75 ft wide quar-
terpipe that started at about 2 ft and
ended around 8
ft high with about 3 ft of vert. By
the end of the day we were exhaust-
ed, I so we thanked Ivo for showing us
around and headed back to the hotel
for the usual routine: drinks, gam-
bling, and more drinks.
Our last day in Portugal was spent
sightseeing. If Gabe hadn't rented a
car we never would've seen anything.
The Portugese don't believe in con-
crete sidewalks; every sidewalk is
made of marble rocks. What they do
is pay guys $100.00 a day to make the
sidewalks out of little square rocks,
and
one by
one they chisel these
rocks into the ground. Everywhere
you go in Portugal it's like this. That
would probably explain why there
wasn't much to streetskate. Another
thing
I couldn't believe was that back
in the day the Portugese brought
Americans over to make a bridge
identical to our Golden Gate Bridge in
San Francisco. Damn copycats.
Portugal has a lot of historical land-
marks, a lot of good people, and a lot
of damn pizza. All in all,
the entire trip was definitely
unforgettable; we made a lot of new
friends and learned how to say, "I
want to get drunk" in Portugese. So if
you're ever in Estoril, Portugal, be
sure to go to the S. Mamede Hotel
and ask for Manuel. He'll leave the
light on for you.