Red Bull Photofiles -Rutger Pauw
Red Bull Build The Trick - Make the world a skater place
Potholes and wobbly hand rails, raw asphalt and brittle obstacles. Sometimes, due to their small defects, the best spots are simply unskateable. That’s why the participants of Red Bull Build The Trick are currently servicing Poland’s desolate insider’s tips – not, admittedly, for entirely altruistic purposes.
“If you want a thing well done,” advised Charles Haddon Spurgeon, “do it yourself.”
Whether the British Baptist preacher had the optimization of potential skating spots on his to-do list is doubtful. And now, 150 years later, Red Bull Build The Trick is embracing his credo in a project with lasting advantages.
Public places tuned for skaters
For the second time, this year 20 skaters are traveling through Poland for one-and-a-half weeks – armed with wooden plates and flyouts, metal sheets and cement, brooms, brushes and crack filler. Wherever they spy potential skating spots with fun-halting shortcomings they stop. Then the work begins: ramps are built, obstacles optimized, streets, stairs, hand rails and dried-up pools are improved, and with the help of ramps and connecting bits and pieces are made useable for skaters. Naturally the work is not only an altruistic gift for the local skating communities: with the hard work done, the guys in the Red Bull Build The Trick crew fully inaugurate the new skate spots themselves.
Do-it-yourself course with an enlightenment bonus
“In a way it opened my eyes,” the Polish skate pro Tomek Kotrych said about his Red Bull Build The Trick experience. “It completely changed my behavior when I comb the cities. Now I just don’t search for spots but I look at areas that could easily be improved and changed into new, great places to ride.”
Proactiveness not popular everywhere
Needless to say, the pleasure of the local skating communities, which lastingly benefit from the new skate spots for free, is not shared by all the inhabitants of the tour stops Gdansk, Torun, Czestochowa and Katowice: That skaters pimp public places in their do-it-yourself way for their hobby gets a few scowls, especially with the uniformed forces. Charm and negotiating skills should help to preserve the budget, like last year: Back then, over a period of ten days, the Red Bull Build The Trick participants got away with only one police fine.
