Adrien Bulard 'New Life Part'
Nobody likes negativity; it brings people down and doesn't do anyone any favours. Yet sometimes it's hard to be positive and instead we have to learn lessons from the negative things we see around us. How does this relate to a clip that contains a back tail down El Toro, one of the gnarliest tricks of all time? Well you need to go back to the fall 2002 installment of On Video to get to the bottom of this.
Back in the day there were arbiters of skateboarding; the magazines and industry overlords ran the show and decided what was acceptable. Nowadays, where instantly shareable content means 'the Dudes' can be bypassed, everyone with a phone and the bottle to jump on something big can get their fifteen minutes of fame and, truth be told, there's a lot that's positive to be said about this. A small group of friends based in California, running the entire industry based on nepotism and a very narrow mindset meant many great skateboarders never got the opportunities they deserved and were burnt by experiences they never should have been subject to. However, this did mean that content was (nearly) always held to a strict set of standards and style, above everything else, was the thing that mattered.
This is where Adrien comes in. Sure, some of the tricks he does in this are genuinely bonkers - to do a backtail shuv on the Hollywood High 16 is insane, no doubt about it. The problem, as it always has been, is that he looks truly awful on a skateboard and sadly that takes away from every mind blowing trick he does in this. Now as we said before, nobody likes negativity so we easily could have not bothered sharing this, but then lessons would never have been learned about the rights and wrongs of skateboarding. We definitely recommend you watch this and by all means enjoy it, but then promise us you'll dig out On Video's 'Why Style Matters' - then you'll know exactly what we mean and you'll be all the wiser for it