Maxim Habanec presents Red Bull Steep Street

Maxim Habanec: The idea for the event came from my travels and the way I like to skate. I’ve always loved no-push lines and high-speed skateboarding. About a year ago, I started filming more downhill videos for my channel. We started with the streets of Prague, but I progressed quite fast to the fifth-steepest street in USA. The viewers loved the content, and even people who don't skate can understand that you need a crazy skill level to go all-in.

I realised that the whole thing is so simple and pure that it will always be fun to watch. It came into my mind that if you put some street obstacles in the mix it would take the whole thing to next level. I was wondering how to make the format work for a long time and I figured out we should judge the speed, too. So each rider is scored 0-100 for the tricks they manage to deliver going downhill, but minus the time of the run. So the faster you go, the fewer points you lose for speed. Since Kostelní takes about 20-50 seconds to ride, that is more or less half the score.

The street by itself is quite alright, yes! It's steep but good ground and – besides the speed bumps – quite fun to skate. To make things more intense, we'll add some crazy obstacles. I think that nobody wants to see contest tricks done on the same old obstacles all the time. To be honest, we're trying to avoid skatepark handrails and hubbas. Not sure if I'm speaking only for myself, but I don't want to see any more 270 to lipslides or 360-flip lipslides. I thought it would be nice to see some raw skateboarding and push the limits of what's possible while going downhill. Hopefully, it will bring something new to the game.

It’s important to point out that it will be impossible to hit all the main obstacles, so the riders will need to choose their lines or come up with unique approaches. We will have a gap into the downhill, a head-height rainbow rail, an obstacle which we call the ‘Polejam to Heaven’… then there are some good old kickers over bins, containers and my favourite – a super-long, high-speed rail, which is more than 10m in length. This will be a real street contest with high risk but bigger reward. I think people will love the show, and riders will feed off the support from the crowd.

It's going to be mainly international riders. When I was thinking about the Red Bull Steep Street competition, I knew we would need the best riders. The course is very hard to skate – you need a lot of skill to be just able to finish the race and hit the obstacles. I’m glad some really big names are going to show up. We will have Jake Wooten, Brandon Valjalo, Danny Leon, Angelo Caro, Skaters on Lucerna winner Douwe Macare as well as other European rippers like Denny Pham, Ivan Federico and Santino Exenberger. It’s going to be wild!

My favourites so far would be Jake or Angelo. They both skate very differently, but they have all they need to take the win and go home with the money.

Powerslides are fine. However, if you do too many, you’re going to slow down, which will result in lost time points! Tail drags are fine, too, but judges will be looking for style, and tail drags will lower that score.

Lucerna is a very important building in the centre of Prague. It was owned by the family of our first post-Communist president, Vaclav Havel. Most big movie premieres, balls and high-society events are held there. When I saw there was a chance to do a skate event in the heart of Prague, I had to do it. For me, it was more about being a statement of where skateboarding came from in Czech to where it is now! We pretty much brought skateboarding to the fanciest place in Prague. To be honest, organising the whole thing was such a mission that I thought I’d never do something like that again... and Red Bull Steep Street, let’s go!