![]() ![]() ![]() It all came down to Layer’s rotation and how it should be classified - the landlubbers said it was a backside alley-oop, while surfers said Layer rode a frontside wave, overriding anything that came later.Also on Saturday, O’Neill brought his finesse to the Independent Trucks Best Trick contest, winning second place and $2,000 for a highly technical backside bigflip to backward nosegrind down the hubba ledge. Skateboarding and snowboarding have taken on evolved understandings of frontside and backside, matters original to surfing based which way you’re facing relative to the swell. For the surf side of the naming game, it was a turf battle. The surf trick goes by surf-naming conventions, damnit, said Kelly Slater, while upstarts like Tony Hawk argued that named tricks that had exceeded surfing were settled law, with naming rights going to the skaters and snowboarders who did them first. Save for the occasional flares of confusion around things like fakie backside tailslides and the arcana around the proper use of “varial,” I consider skateboard trick naming conventions to be relatively set. Then, the other night, former pro skater and longtime contest judge John Muldoon hit me with an Instagram direct message that sent me for a loop. He offered two clips, each 50-50 grinds on a round tub or trough, done at the same spot by Alexis Ramirez and Braden Hoban. ![]() “Need your 2 cents on a debate,” Muldoon wrote, “which one would you say is frontside and which is backside?” I’d seen Ramirez’ looped and leaned grind a couple days prior, appreciating the posturing and all that and how someone had finally, really grinded a full circle. I typed back, “Can’t deny the roll up: is backside and is frontside.” OLLIE OOP SKATEBOARD TRICK FULL ![]() I’d vindicated Muldoon, who’d gotten into a bit of a tiff about it earlier in the day he went on to report some head-scratching news. A small cross section of mutual friends, he said, dudes who I figured should know, were claiming Ramirez’ trick was frontside. Like many of us, I’ve put in silly amounts of time thinking about and trying to understand skateboarding, and part of that is deciphering the sometimes convoluted but mostly straightforward system of trick categorization and nomenclature. At one point I was paid to write captions for skateboard photos - I could name that thing what I reasonably thought that thing was called - that were published in print magazines.Īs a kid I read Transworld Skateboarding and wondered if a pivot grind was just another word for a 5-0 I worked toward an elegant and simple mental system for naming tricks while also pushing for “slipfoot” to be a name for one-footed Ollies eventually, as an adult, I was that dude who said there’s no such thing as a nollie Cab because a Caballerial is inherently fakie. I took the question of the grind to Twitter, tapping out a tweet in which I should have noticed the typo, and waited. “As someone who has done this on a similar spot and who has trouble grinding rails frontside, it’s definitely backside. That’s how you pinch and naturally wanna curve backside,” he tweeted, following it up with supporting evidence, curved but not wholly circular grinds, that are indisputably one side or the other. He even put out a series of Instagram story posts to illustrate the point. I sent my fellow traveler a DM, asking what had compelled him to come out so hard for backside. ![]()
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