I grew up in England, and my first interaction with skateboarding was seeing it through the windows of my local swimming pool.

I spoke to a bunch of the people I saw observing from the edges of the event to find out what they thought our deal was, or whether they thought we were capable of having a deal at all. Almost all the reactions were positive, but I guess the people who were truly appalled by our presence didn’t stick around to talk about it.

Dominic, Marina & their son

This kid told me multiple times that he thought skateboarding was dangerous and didn’t like it, and was more interested in playing chess. His father Dominic was surprised that no one was wearing any protection and hit the nail on the head by guessing that most skaters think wearing pads in the streets is kinda wack.

Marina thought having the session in the centre of the city was a great idea and meant that kids could easily see skateboarding and get interested in it; she also said it was inspiring to see so many women skating. I got the impression she would like her son to try it, but he kept whining and they left to take him to his chess lesson.

Aslan

This guy was sitting on a bench by the river before the contest started. He stayed and watched the whole thing with a smile on his face, nodding his head to the music. He said he was from Turkey and only had one visible tooth, and he didn’t understand why the ramps were bank to wallrides instead of smooth quarter pipes, which he thought would be much easier to skate. I explained that they’d been built like that on purpose, but in my bad German, I’m not sure if the message got through. I don’t know what the hand sign means, but I quite like it.

Katya & Philipp

This couple looked very Viennese. They were watching the ledge session going down at Schwarzenbergplatz. Katya assumed it was good for your mental health to repeatedly fail and then eventually succeed in landing a trick. It was good to hear that she could see the value in people slamming into the ground and shouting at inanimate pieces of wood.

Klaudia & Peter

I saw this couple watching the warmup session when it was mostly guys skating, and Klaudia asked me, somewhat disappointedly, where all the ladies were. I told them to stick around for the main event when more girls would arrive and thin out the sausage fest, but I’m not sure if they did.

Ivor

He had just arrived in Vienna from Dubai to take care of some property business which he mentioned his father owned. Since arriving, he was delighted to discover alcohol can be bought freely in the supermarket, and he’d been drinking vodka and smoking hash alone in a park all afternoon. Apparently, if you want to buy hash in Dubai you have to use bitcoin and get sent GPS coordinates where people bury it in the desert for you to dig up, like a treasure hunt.

The music pumping from the session got his attention, and he came over to see what was going on. Eventually I was offered the keys to his Mercedes G Wagon and was told that I could drive us wherever we needed to go in order to buy some booger sugar, but I’d drank too many beers at that point to take him up on this potentially hilarious offer and wouldn’t have known where to go anyway.

He called his dad to tell him how great his first eight hours in Vienna had been and he was generous enough to pass along the phone numbers of two prostitutes if he needed them. What a father. The bike he is sitting on does not belong to him.

Thomas

I saw Thomas wander up from the river path and stop in the grass, watching people skating from a distance. He said he’d been swimming and was walking home when he heard Raining Blood by Slayer playing, so he wandered up closer to check it out. He told me that he loved the music but didn’t like skateboarding at all.

Shannon the medic & co-worker

It must be strange being a medic at a skate event because people are constantly eating shit, but unless something really bad happens, we don’t stop and ask for help. We just keep going until we get our trick. Apparently Shannon was trying to chase one of the skaters down to sort out his shredded hand and stop him from leaving bloody handprints all over the place, but he just wouldn’t stop skating.

She was half Irish and half Austrian and looked like she wanted to punch one of the skaters when he asked her which half was which. I’d never heard that joke before and thought it was actually quite funny, but I guess it wasn’t a new one for her. I didn’t get the name of the other guy, but he made sure he hid his pouch of tobacco and the cigarette he was rolling before this photo was taken, lest we view him as unprofessional.

Words & Photos by: Theo Acworth
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