Focusing on the good things

ALASTAIR PAULIN

Motueka saw what Stoke missed out on when the Tasman Skatepark Tour hit town last Saturday.

Ollies, grinds, bluntsides, grabs ... and that was just the skateboarders. The scooter riders and BMXers were throwing down some huge tricks, or, as organiser Paul McConachie from the Tasman District Council put it, "stomped trick after trick".

Several BMX riders got huge air as they launched off a quarter pipe and backflipped in graceful 360-degree loops, and the trick was repeated by a 15-year-old on a scooter.

Motueka BMX rider Jake Prebble landed the first front flip ever seen in competition at the park. The trick has a high degree of difficulty, and drew a loud chorus of gasps from the 200-strong crowd, many of them wearing "OMG, I don't believe what I just saw, that was sick!" expressions.

Skaters and BMXers have their own language, as any self-respecting youth culture does, so don't be intimidated if you can't understand it.

There's no need to be intimidated by the riders, either. To judge from some of the flurry of letters to the editor over the proposed skatepark in Stoke last year, you would have thought that downtown Stoke was in danger of being invaded by zombies bearing skateboards as weapons.

An editorial in the Nelson Mail, which called skateboarding a "fad", said skateparks "seem to be a magnet for antisocial behaviour", and asked how many young people "have received exactly the wrong sort of peer pressure through hanging around the neighbourhood skatepark after dark?".

The planned $500,000 Stoke skatepark has been canned – and I don't wish to relitigate the issue, but I can report the good news from Motueka, home to Tasman's oldest and largest skatepark.

That the park is now considered the best BMX park in the region is because the people who use it have been heavily involved in its upgrades over the years. Not only have they made suggestions to the TDC over what features they would like to see, they have done a huge amount of the grunt work to make it happen.

Every winter, several riders, including Motueka semi-pros Aidan Limmer and Jake Prebble, dig mountains of clay into a series of scarily high jumps that they then use in summer to send themselves flying.

Jake, 23, and Aidan, 20, are key members of a tight group of longtime riders called the Mot Boys. I've covered some of these guys riding at competitions during the past four years and seen them get better and better.

I've also seen them with the "grommets", the young kids who look at them with awe and hope to emulate their skills.

The top riders are patient and kind with the kids, showing them their bikes and encouraging them in their own mini-tricks. At Quinney's Bush one summer, I watched Motueka rider Ryan Lightfoot put on a show at the skatepark and then hang around for an hour, high-fiving pint-sized daredevils on 12-inch bikes and praising their riding.

Johnny Bonnar, who was a top rider until his career was cut short by an accident, and is now a journalism student and writer/photographer who covers extreme sports, says he can remember when he was a little kid being encouraged by earlier generations of older riders.

Having the skatepark to go to "helped keep me from some of the other distractions", he said.

His sentiment was echoed by Sergeant Rob Crawford of Motueka police, who said the skatepark was a "good asset for the community".

"If we didn't have it, I think we would be inundated with more complaints."

He said police dealt with a little trouble at the skatepark but "it is a very, very small minority of young people causing the issues. Unfortunately, that's what people focus on – they focus on the single bad day rather than the 30 good ones".

When I asked a couple of young riders at the park on Thursday morning what the best thing about it was, Eden Beech, 12, said it was "having something to do".

His stepbrother Tarn McGowan, 14, agreed. "If you have nothing to do, you're more likely to get into trouble."

They pointed out the various features of the park, like the five "hips", where quarter pipes meet at an angle, the "spine" between the bowl and another quarter-pipe, and the skateboarders' "pyramid" in the centre of the large concrete pad.

"I reckon the skatepark's cool because it attracts a group of people who get together to do what they love – it's a good space to have," Tarn said.

The fears about what groups of teenagers might do when they get together are as old as the concept of teenagers itself. If the skatepark was not the locus of this concern, it would be a milk bar, or an Elvis concert, or a disco: pick your era.

Eden told me that if he wasn't at the skatepark, he'd be swimming in the river or reading. He then listed about half a dozen novels he's got on the boil at the moment.

I don't think we have much to fear from the kids who hang out at skateparks – except that they might break an arm by pushing the limits of gravity.

- © Fairfax NZ News