Friday, October 18, 2013

Skating the Unskateable #1: David Gravette

The fact that David Gravette came out with this Gregslist video just to skate literal garbage from a rusty pipe to a piano shows his exact spirit for skateboarding: getting out of your comfort zone and conquering new obstacles. David is very good with this and has shown his expansion of spots particularly well with new ridiculous handrails and transitions. He skates some of the gnarliest obstacles possible and seriously expands on the possibilities of what can be skated. His handrail skating is some of the most dangerous and impressive in the game and has been for a good number of years now.
Looking back to his And Now part, aside from the few insane handrails that may be only skateable to a select few of handrail killers, the few clips from 1:47-2:10 peek into David's spot creativity. From a tall sewer tunnel to a cartoonishly enormous pole jam to a legit brick wall skatestopper built right at the end of a handrail (which David gaps out over nonchalantly).
In Hesh Law at 1:27, David skates a crazy handrail that is much longer than you'd expect, and then at 1:37 he skates a mini electrical box on the side of a telephone pole to show that nothing is out of reach.
In Beware of Sasquatch he skates a bracketed handrail at 2:54 and somehow avoids the natural skatestoppers, despite the lack of any surface area of a rail to grind on.
In Prevent This Tragedy he just glides around a super curved handrail and backside 180s out for good measure at 1:42, even though just maintaining composure through the curve seems impossible. The last rail has surely turned countless other handrail killers away, but with a godly 50-50 like David has he stays unaffected by the kink in the handrail as the rail just keeps getting longer and longer. Perfect balance cheat codes? Check.
Since David's been on a rampage of skating this past year, he released a CSFU Bonus Part in which he opens up skating a dirtbike course in the middle of the woods. Keyword: dirtbike. At 1:03 he steeply drops in and then rides a sketchy looking rail ingrained in the dirt and decides that it's not enough, so he comes out into a nose manual and then pops into the bowl. An impossible combo all starting from the impossible grind.
David's most recent full video part in CSFU (above) contains quite possibly the main reason for this week's subject: his very first trick of the part. After a long and mentally gruesome battle with the rail, David rides the roller coaster 50-50 through two full 90 degree turns containing small kinks, all while gradually going downhill as well. This trick in itself deserves a medal of some kind because balancing does not work like that. He later launches into a no pop full speed feeble grind at 1:42 around a tight curve; it's all in the posture on this one. At 2:02 he flies down a well-sloped handrail into two kinks and a shifting angle of the rail as well, gliding through the grind like it's nothing, even though just looking at the rail makes any trick seem unlikely. The run up for the rail at 2:52 appears to be way to small but a quick carve and David magically sticks with the enormous double kinker all the way down.
And lastly, in David's Real Street part (which is filled with some rather awesome clips) he slides right over a bunch of bike racks at 0:28. It's funny because bike racks are meant to stop you, but David clearly is having no business with these standard rules. The ender 50-50 is better shown here with all the trials and tribulations, both physical and mental. What's absurd about this trick is mixing the number of kinks with the actual steepness and shortness of them too. Only David could see this as being an actual spot to skate.

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