Too many people

Now for some stuff I actually saw myself. Saturday we went to check out the BMX street preliminaries. I don't know if it's because it was the weekend, or because of publicity, or just because of the growing popularity of these sports, but the place was PACKED — many more people than last year. The stands were totally filled up, and there were LONG lines waiting to get into the stands — but you couldn't get in until someone in the stands left. Needless to say, we weren't going to waste our time standing around forever, so we found a crappy obstructed view looking over the fence and spent about 20 minutes watching Taj and Troy and a couple other guys. Then we left for Impact to ride in the parking lot for a while.

Flatland

Later that day we checked out the flatland demo; this year it was done by Kevin Jones, Chad DeGroot, Andrew Faris, Trevor Meyer, and Leif Valen. ("All the big bike companies plus Kev" was how one person put it.) It was performed with little real organization (no announcing or fanfare like the other events), and it was pretty much just the riders going out one at a time. I never get to see the pros ride (besides on video), so it was pretty cool — and even their safe "show" tricks are radder than anything I'll ever do.

Kev seemed to be taking it easy, but was doing some fairly impossible stuff like no-footed deathtrucks and one-handed hang-5s on the pedal. Leif was doing his smooth flowing links, as well as bar-endo hang-5s (or a seatgrab hang-5 on the pedal for you kids who don't know what a bar endo is). Trevor did some damn rad stuff, including some rad G-turn/bar spin links, and a backwards-rolling backpacker to cross-footed hitchhiker.

And while the entire time the demo is going on, Large Ray is sitting in front of me talking McCoy's ear off. I've never heard anyone talk so long (and loud) about the "good old days" in my life...