When we got to York, a sign let us know that the Jam had been moved from its usual parking lot to some school. When we got there, we found a smaller number of riders on a slanted riding area. It kind of brought us down some, but there was no use complaining (although I did my share of it--sorry Brian, Jon & Rick). And to top it off, the cops came and kicked us out, forcing us to a church parking lot (I think the lot where the jams were originally held, but I'm not positive--I'm not well-versed in York history), which was worse than the previous place.

There weren't any "big name" pros there (except Leif Valen, of course, but being a York resident he almost had to be there), but some riders I did recognize included Brian Tunney, Ivan the Terrible (someone told me his last name, but damned if I can remember it), Brian Huffman, several Ohio riders (minus Carl Potts), the Pittsburgh Posse, and of course a good chunk of New Englanders. There were also a couple French riders (one I recognized from the Virginia B.S. contest) who were more than a little impressive.

These days flatland is so complicated, confusing, and basically impossible to describe, but I'll mention a couple I can remember, and can actually try to describe: Brian Tunney was doing steamroller to half-barspin to hitch hiker, into a darkside variation where he turns around and goes to an inverted backwards wheelie (did you follow that?). Ivan rides so smooth and does cool, original stuff, including megaspin to inverted megaspin, and some cool rolling walkover variations. Speaking of rolling walkovers, Kevin Cunningham (pictured at top of page) was rolling them clear across the parking lot--sick! PP's Val Nasso had some real cool original stuff (including a rad front wheel string that included, among other things, a full bar-spin Karl kruzer), and Leif (pictured here) was trying a weird cross-handed steamroller switched to blender on the pedal spinning counter-clockwise.

Mark Eaton didn't have a new Dorkin' video to premiere, but he had done the new Haro video (called "Candy") to show at the theater. The showing was at 10:30, but by 7:30 our little group was ready to return to Massachusetts. So because of our early departure, I can't tell you about the video, though I heard that I didn't miss much since I'm not really into BMX racing...

In hindsight, I guess it wasn't really that bad of a trip, but at the time it totally sucked--the low rider turnout, the hassle of getting kicked out by the cops, the mediocre riding areas all compounded to make it seem worse than it really was (to me, anyway). And the fact that the car got a flat tire and the CD player broke on the way home just topped it off nicely.

Updated April 1996