Skateboarding
Latvian skateboarding ambassador Madars Apse continues his global search for the sport’s biggest stories in a brand new series of Skate Tales – get the inside track here.
Madars Apse’s Skate Tales is back! Season Three of the internet-busting adventure series exploring skateboarding’s outside edge returns, with six new skate stories that you won’t see anywhere else.
This time around, Madars has gone all-out to meet skateboarding’s outliers from around the world: Argentina, India, Japan, Brazil, Spain and the USA all receive a visit from skateboarding’s most curious mind, as he asks each episode subject the magic question: ‘what does skateboarding mean to you?’
To begin with, get ready to enter the skateboarding universes of Takahiro Morita, Vitória Mendonça and Wes Kremer, as Skate Tales comes out swinging for Season 3.
01
Season 3
Madars meets skateboarding’s Beatniks, the No Hotels crew
The No Hotels crew are skateboarding’s Beatniks. These Floridians are on a mission to experience the world through skateboarding in the most rudimentary way: living simply, making art, camping where they can and filming their experiences on old cameras along the way.
Their skate philosophy is a throwback to the romance of the open road that American Beat novelist Jack Kerouac depicted in his 1957 book On The Road. Madars had to find out more about what makes these rippers tick, so he joins them on a skate mission of nearly 500km through Argentina to get a sense of their skateboarding life lived with just one single rule: no hotels.
Madars meets Indian female skate pioneer Atita Verghese
Atita Verghese is India’s foremost female skater. She discovered skateboard culture through the country’s Holystoked crew that built India’s first DIY skatepark in Bangalore. In 2014, Atita founded Girl Skate India, an NGO which encourages young women to follow her path into skateboarding for themselves.
Atita is an inspiration to women worldwide and especially in India, where skating is still in its infancy. Having learned how to mix concrete and shape transitions with the Holystoked collective, she's worked on the majority of skatepark builds throughout her home country. Along the way, skateboarding has led her to feature in many adverts, a TED talk, roles in movies and even a cameo appearance in the Netflix show Skater Girl. In a society where opportunities for girls to be free of social constraints are thin on the ground, Atita does more than just provide boards, pads or lessons – she's created a one-woman movement. That has to be something worth checking out!
Madars meets Richie Jackson, skateboarding’s last true outlaw
Death Skateboards pro Richie Jackson broke the skateboarding mould and threw its unwritten rule book in the bin, ushering in the ‘anything goes’ era everyone applauds today. With a wild imagination and inventive approach to what street skateboarding can be, the New Zealander has eclipsed most of his peers in terms of public awareness by using social media to leapfrog out of the skateboarding norm.
Holder of the most-watched video part in Thrasher’s history and possessor of unique style, it's probably no surprise that Richie is also resented by the kind of ‘pros’ who can only sell boards to their parents. But this guy doesn’t care. He’s out there exploring skateboarding’s frontiers of possibility come what may. That, surely, merits more investigation.
Madars meets Takahiro Morita
Takahiro Morita is a very different sort of skateboarder. Japanese skating has changed the coastline of possibility in skateboarding, mostly thanks to the FESN movement. The Far East Skate Network’s videos brought the new Japanese ways of seeing and being to the wider skateboarding world and made the culture more imaginative – and maybe a little kinder, too.
Takahiro is the brains behind the FESN, and someone more personally responsible for opening up the concept of what skating can be today than anyone else in recent years. From cruising Tokyo to the art world, his considered approach to what skateboarding can mean makes him one of the most genuinely unique minds that skateboarding culture has produced, full stop. Madars just had to meet him!
When Madars met Vitoria Mendonça
Vitoria Mendonça is the new face of skateboarding.
From a humble background in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, her skating ability has raised her up to become one of the most visible female skaters in the worldwide sponsorship game today. Not just that, but she's also parlayed her talent into a successful parallel career as a model, and got herself nominated as Thrasher’s Skater Of The Year 2022!
With the roadmap for professional female skating still evolving, nobody writes scripts for life stories like this. If you believe that skateboarding is a dream factory, then you have to meet the inspirational Vitoria.
Tracking down the elusive Wes Kremer!
Wes Kremer is your favourite skateboarder’s actual favourite skateboarder: an offline enigma who manages to be both one of the world’s most highly-rated and least visible pro's at the same time. One of the purest souls in skateboarding, the San Diego native and former Thrasher Magazine Skater Of The Year might be expected to chase the benefits of the attention economy.
Instead, Wes doesn't exist on social media at all – preferring to live a life of relative anonymity, committed to the tour van and the everyman aspect of skateboarding life. The most elusive skate hero of the digital age, Madars sets out to discover how Wes juggles sponsorship responsibilities with a skateboarding career devoted to avoiding any unnecessary limelight. Join Madars as he kicks it with the unique Wes Kremer!
Be sure to download the free Red Bull TV app and catch the skate action on all your devices! Get the app here!
02
Season 2
Madars and the Fancy Lads
Matt Tomasello and the Fancy Lad gang have flipped what we know as skateboarding on its head. As some of the most innovative and creative backyard wizards ever, they've taken the concept of tricks and board assembly to new realms of silliness. Tomasello and the boys have pushed the boundaries of skate possibility into a light-hearted but gnarly space with his range of jerry-rigged, spring-loaded' manips'.
With their Boston skatehouse acting as a kind of insane laboratory, the Fancy Lads have won worldwide acclaim, as their creations and reckless vibes have seen them showcased in both museums and comedy shows like Adult Swim. Join Apse as he tries to unravel whether skateboarding is art, comedy or a heady mix of both. We're going skating the Fancy Lad way!
Madars and Kilian Martin
Skateboarding can be art not just in execution, but in context, as Kilian Martin's videos make clear. This is a guy that keeps a list by his bed to write down trick ideas that come to him in dreams and then tries to make those dreams into reality. That’s pretty much a metaphor for his life.
Who ever heard of a Spanish freestyle pro in the 2020s? Martin made his dreams come true by doing the other thing, seeking new opportunities that would allow his skatecraft to take him into a world he could only imagine. He took skateboarding's least popular genre and became a sensation in the commercial world, outside of the skate industry's reach. His internet following runs into the millions. Martin is a self-made skate empire all of his own. Follow your dreams.
Apache Skateboards' story
Douglas Miles Jr is one of the scions of a new wave of indigenous skaters fusing their roots in Native American culture with the modern movement of skateboarding. Born and raised in Arizona's San Carlos Apache Reservation, he was introduced to skateboarding by his father, the acclaimed fine artist Douglas Miles. Doug Senior had started painting on skateboards as a medium, and given the groundswell of interest this created, he founded Apache Skateboards, a brand in which the Apache community could recognise a connection to their own culture within this relatively new form of expression.
Vibing with Felipe Nunes
Felipe Nunes is a 22-year-old skater from Curitiba, Brazil. Aged just six, he lost both legs while playing on train tracks, and after five years in a wheelchair, he was given a longboard to get around on. That longboard would become a skateboard, and the rest is history.
Nunes never thought of himself as different from the others and went on to compete and win contests against able-bodied skaters. People started to notice just how talented he really was. Aged 18, he felt ready to make it beyond Brazil and started a social media fund to enter Tampa Am. Tony Hawk championed his cause, and Nunes was headed to Florida. Incredibly, he made the semis and finished 21st overall as the only adaptive skater in the contest. He had the skateboarding world's attention and soon joined Hawk's brand Birdhouse Skateboards. In 2019, he scored the cover of Thrasher magazine and did The Loop second go. Now pro for Birdhouse, his career has gone from strength to strength. As the man himself says: no excuses!
Uganda Skateboard Society
The true unit of measurement in skateboarding is heart, not skill. Skateboarding doesn't require skill, to begin with, but it demands heart from day one. The people who gain most from skating are those to whom it means the most, and you'll go a long way before you find more pure skateboarding passion than with Gerald Gose and the Ugandan Skateboarding Society.
This episode of Skate Tales sees Madars Apse enlist Tyler Surrey to go and meet the skate crew who built their own unique park from plans off the internet and then started to create their moves.
Rock it with Mike Vallely
Mike Vallely is one of the most legendary, influential and controversial skaters ever. Passionate, provocative, insightful and unapologetic, he's ridden for some of the biggest companies in skateboarding history, is responsible for some timeless graphics, destroyed more contests than anyone can remember – and still found time to front punk band Black Flag. With a 35-year pro career under his belt and several lifetimes of experience lived, he is the outlier's outlier. A life lived against the grain: always on the outside edge but always in demand. There are no other Mike Vallely's.
03
Season 1
It's locals only as Madars Apse meets the Osaka Daggers
One of the most fascinating aspects of Darwinian evolutionary theory is the phenomenon of allopatric speciation, which happens when a species is split up by geography and begins to change relative to one another in order to better adapt to their terrain. Japanese skateboarding has done precisely that.
As the rest of skateboarding has followed a fairly formulaic trajectory of tricks and spots, Japan's limited urban space and geographic isolation have turned its skateboarding culture into something different altogether.
Evisen, FESN, Gou Miyagi and the Lenz videos all constitute part of this cultural splinter movement, but foremost among their number are the Osaka Daggers, a rag-tag cabal of skaters and like-minded creatives who gravitate around the orbit of Osaka's Triangle Park skate spot.
First given the title of Osaka Daggers by Burnley's graphic design guru and international playboy, Mark 'Fos' Foster, in reference to one of the gangs in 1986's high camp skatesploitation movie Thrashin', the Osaka Daggers have become the leading lights of Japan's contribution to the kaleidoscope of global skate culture.
For the ultimate episode of the inaugural Skate Tales season, it was inevitable that our own skating maverick, Madars Apse, would stop by to meet the enigmatic Daggers, sample some obscure Japanese street food and bond over hairstyle upgrades.
See you next season for another outrageous series of Madars Apse's Skate Tales.
Skate maverick Beaver Fleming shows Madars Apse about going your own way
When Madars Apse’s Skate Tales launched, you were promised outliers and there probably isn't a bigger outlier in the skateboarding world today than Big Air specialist Beaver Fleming.
An undeniable projectile of genuine, cynicism-free fun, the Tennessee native started skating at 10-years-old.
Spotted at Woodward Skate Camp by FMX legend Travis Pastrana, Fleming was invited to join the touring extreme sports showcase Nitro Circus, where he holds down skating duties alongside the daredevils of motocross, BMX, inline and a raft of other action sports disciplines.
A ripping bowl skater in his own right, Fleming's child-like enthusiasm and energy set him apart in a skateboarding world of invisible codes and norms. Naturally, Madars Apse had to roll out with him to see what skateboarding means to one of its most fearless mavericks.
Scene-building in Ethiopia with Madars Apse as Skate Tales hits Addis Ababa
For episode four of Skate Tales, Madars hightails it to Ethiopia to meet the skate crew building a scene from scratch in one of the world’s oldest countries.
The story of Ethiopia Skate is as real as it gets: from a parking lot in Addis Ababa, Henok Yetbarek, Michael Baheru, Ruel Desta, Babure ‘Babu G’ Teferi, Yeabkal Abraham and Yared Gobezie started a skating movement which would snowball with the help of two American skaters, JT Rhoades and Sean Stromsoe.
Within three years, they would link up with Make Life Skate Life to build Ethiopia’s first free skatepark in the capital, and a year later, they would double down on their success by building a second in Awassa. Now Ethiopia Skate has 150 skaters enlisted from around the country and has registered as a non-profit in the USA, meaning they can accept tax-deductible donations to keep their skatehouse open, build more terrain and, as Sean tells Madars ‘create more opportunities through skateboarding’.
Madars came by to build and inspire, listen and learn in a beautiful chapter from the Skate Tales storybook.
If you want to know more about Ethiopia Skate and their wonderful journey, find them here!
Lose your mind in Detroit Rock City as Madars Apse meets Dan the Man
It's been a busy couple of years for Dan Mancina since we brought you his story in Out Of Frame, back in 2018.
As well as getting on Real and Adidas, Dan has filmed sections with Jenkem and The Berrics, and his remarkable story has featured in TV, magazine and newspaper stories as far away from his Michigan home as Spain and Ireland. As Dan’s skill and heart rang out across the world, the power of social media allowed other skaters with similar conditions to Dan to reach out and link up.
Dan’s street footage in his Out Of Frame inspired fellow blind skater Justin Bishop to take his skating out into the built environment, too. In this episode of Skate Tales, Madars visits Dan just as Justin rolls into town to rip and relate their experiences and hopes for the future, as the three skaters set off on a downtown weekender rolling around Detroit Rock City.
Always one who's up for new experiences and keen to understand, Madars even tries skating without the power of his own sight, slaughtering himself in the process, as you might imagine!
So what does skateboarding mean to Dan Mancina? Roll out with Madars once again as he finds out in one seriously uplifting highlight of his super Skate Tales!
Wild out with Sergio Yuppie as Madars Apse’s Skate Tales heads to Brazil
Sergio Yuppie is the king of the downhill slide in skateboarding, full-stop. For the second instalment of Skate Tales, Madars Apse is headed to the ‘Magic Island’ of Florianópolis on Brazil’s Atlantic seaboard to meet him. Florianópolis is to skateboarding in South America what Oregon is to the same culture in North America: a scene with generations of history, important to the wider culture but not dependent on it. All kinds of skateboarding flourish in places like Floripa, as the locals know it.
As you may already be aware, Pedro Barros hails from here, a product of the backyard bowl culture that prevails in the pousadas dotted around the island; but another branch of skating thrives on the steep and daunting downhills in Santa Catarina state: slide culture. Sergio Yuppie is its leading light. As Sergio explains to Madars, this skating subculture exists as an offshoot of downhill skateboarding and was pioneered by Cliff Coleman who invented the downhill slide using a gloved hand as a pivot point.
Powell Peralta’s 1985 skate classic Future Primitive brought downhill sliding to a wider audience, and the highly dangerous combination of high speeds and tricks began to develop its own international circuit. Sergio Yuppie dominated that circuit for his entire professional career. With his entire family, they continue to session the hills of Florianópolis daily from their specialist basecamp skate shop Curva De Hill.
Madars links up with Sergio for a taste of Brazilian island life, lessons in culture and some juicy high-speed slams as his roll through skateboarding’s backstreets continues!
Join Madars Apse kicking it with Bam Margera
When Madars Apse embarked upon his year-long tour of skateboarding’s stranger shores, he was always going to stop in with his old friend Bam Margera – a man with many life stories to share.
Skaters, naturally, will remember Margera first as the Toy Machine pro, whose skit-and-stunt filled CKY series of VHS releases made him the first skater of the modern era to make the jump into satellite television celebrity as MTV trawled the subcultures of America, looking for edgier stars of the post-grunge era.
CKY would lead Bam to Jackass, the pop-cultural juggernaut, which in turn would give birth to his eponymous Viva La Bam MTV show, which – in the course of 56 episodes – made him one of the most famous people in the world at the time.
Returning to his Pennsylvania roots, Bam invited Madars and the ripping Loy brothers, Ethan and David, to check out some of his old stomping grounds, like Philadelphia’s iconic Love Park. That was followed by a trip to his brand-new indoor park during an open-house skate party with some of the Westchester locals.
Madars and Bam discuss what skateboarding means to him and trace his path from FDR skatepark through fame to fatherhood and the future.
You know the term 'skate or die'? I'd rather skate
Hop in with Madars as we embark on his wild ride around skateboarding’s global underground, and watch the entire series available from today only on Red Bull TV.