Skateboarding
Remember the nerves before your first Drop In on a quarterpipe? Relive the moment seven times here.
The first time you roll your tail up to the coping, adjust your feet and lean forwards until your front wheels touch the surface of the quarterpipe is a pivotal moment for every skateboarder.
Aside from your first Ollie, this is one of the major challenges you face as you become a skater. Compared to other tricks in your early days, the Drop In takes a huge portion of courage and commitment, as you're always at risk of getting to know the ground with your whole body.
Basically, it's a simple movement, but for some reason your mind sends you so many contradictory signals while you shuffle back and forth up on the platform for what feels like an eternity. The moment you realise that you're actually rolling away is worth the battle.
As skaters, we're suckers for the simple, beautiful things in skateboarding: reason enough to shed some light on seven more of the most mind-bending ways to execute the Drop In.
1. Alex Sorgente – Bomb Drop
Last summer we sent a squad consisting of Alex Sorgente, Milton Martinez and Jan Hoffmann to skate the locked-down Aquaventure, Atlantis The Palm Dubai's waterpark – a once in a lifetime experience as this park gets flooded by millions of litres of water for 364 days a year. This was one of the gnarliest things to go down on a day full of do-or-die skateboarding.
There were concerns a slam would have taken him through the floor of the slide, but thankfully it didn’t come to that. Lost boards had to make the long journey down to the pool.
2. Phil Zwijsen – Ollie In
In skateboarding, bridges are usually a place to shelter from the rain and make a good spot to throw some concrete quarterpipes onto pillars. But climbing up onto one of these physically impressive structures which mankind uses for connecting two separate lands is on a whole other level of insanity. After this quick drop-in, Phil Zwijsen spiced it up with an Ollie into the narrow girder that leaves little room for error.
3. Ryan Sheckler – Drop In
Ryan Sheckler is the ultimate daredevil when it comes to skating bizarre and oversized obstacles. For his opening shot in the long anticipated Plan B video TRUE, he managed to climb up this rusty metal beast which is a banger itself.
“This is sketchy!” he shouts while trying to find his balance on the barely existent platform seconds before going full throttle. Don't try this at home… or when in Barcelona!
4. Madars Apse – Tail Drop
Latvian madman Madars Apse is no stranger to the creative thinking process. Show him a spot that looks barely skateable for the majority of skaters and he'll show you how to get blown away. Same goes for this massive rocky second floor wall-to-bank that he found by using Google Earth on a trip to Alicante. There's a heavy fall, so you have to go very slow to hit it. Madars decided to try it out with a classic Drop In.
5. Alex Sorgente – MegaRamp
Pioneered by the legendary Danny Way in 2003, the MegaRamp's what separates the men from the boys. If you’ve mastered the technique of the Drop In there's theoretically no excuse not to step up to this beast, besides your fear of heights, the lack of ramps available around your home town and the Mach 3 speed you reach. No wonder only a few of the best step to this wild ride that could eventually launch them into orbit!
6. Tom Remillard – Drop In
This manoeuvre looks quite odd given that Tom Remillard's standing on top of a (nearly) vertical wall not a skate ramp. Technically, this Drop In's no different from your regular one on a quarterpipe – except for the missing transition part that will try to wrestle you straight towards the ground. That's the cool thing about skating. Even after 50-plus years of skateboarding there are still new approaches to the simplest tricks!
7. David Gonzalez – Switch Drop In
Berlin's famous Kulturforum spot offers about 100 different options to skate it. There are ledges, handrails, stairs, double sets, big block, small blocks and then there's this bank you just can't overlook. About 15m high and steep as hell, skaters mainly skate the bottom of it. To this very day, only a handful of skaters have run all the way up there to the top of it to haul down and catch some speed wobbles approaching the flat. A young, fearless David Gonzalez switched it up that day and submitted his application for the craziest switch Drop In of all time.
