Urban Sports

Whoot, what happened here? Did I miss something? That was the first coming to my mind when I stumbled upon Kilian Martin’s weird, awesome skateboard tricks just now! Hailing from Spain, and known internationally as professional skateboarder creating an all new way to extend freestyle into the realm of street skating, Kilian Martin’s unique movements set him in a class of his own. Recently he spent some time in an abandoned water park together filmmaker Brett Novak to create his next video Kilian Martin: Altered Route… ...

That’s what I call a great skateboard event: In Vancouver, BC a few hundred people partied Halloween with an extraordinary skateboard fireworks jam in an abandoned skate-park tunnel! This event attracted that much attention throughout the entire galaxy that in addition to Harold Green, Vampires Dream, Banana, Lemmy, the She Wolfs, Manwolf, Ladyman, Scarecrow, Werewolf, Long Underwear Man, Clumsy Lumberjack and Dirty Hippy even Mr. Zaphod Beeblebrox himself came back to earth for a short skate-session! ...

I already heard a lot about wired urban sports, I mean there are people playing Capture the Flag in Berlin, some use their bikes to play polo and others run burning through the city, but I never saw someone freestyle skiing in an urban environment. Maybe that’s because we don’t have snow that often here in Berlin or - and that’s what I prefer as a good reason - pro-skier JP Auclair is really killing it! His piste is the City of Trail, a smaller village in British Columbia! ...

Freerunning is a form of urban acrobatics - we all know that. Nevertheless I was totally flashed after watching the Storm Origins freerunning short film which was shot for a Channel 4 documentary called Concrete Circus! The film shows in action packed scenes the three frerunners Phil Doyle, Paul Joseph and Mathieu Ledoux running, jumping, flying and inline skating through an urban concrete landscape. Of course, the fire action is somehow exaggerated but the DIY SuperSoaker fake flamethrower seems to be good fun! ...

After that nice Spray Paint Skateboard Interface by D*Face became popular (just check e.g. hypebeast, ukstreetart, urbanshit or welikethat) well-known, Berlin-based urban artist Dave the Chimp created his own DIY Skate & Paint Device and sent in that way some beef over to LA… You don’t need money, famous friends, and months of research and development to create something - you just need to think and to play. So switch off your computer, switch on your brain, and go create something fantastic yourself - you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve!!! (Dave the Chimp) ...

Urban Action | I know it’s a controversial topic (especially because of a lot of people died!) but for some people train-surfing is just another kind of an urban extreme sport. Although it’s illegal and dangerous - some would say because of - the small train-surfers scene experienced highlights in different countries in the last years. Nowadays, Russian teenagers in Moscow revive this formerly unfashionable sport again… A new extreme and illegal sport, known as train surfing, is sweeping Russia’s capital. Dozens of young daredevils risk their lives to fight daily boredom and brighten their leisure. The craze involves riding on top or at the side of fast moving carriages, clinging on with their hands or with the aid of a belt. (Russia Today) ...

Have you ever skateboarded an abandoned swimming pool? If not, your chance has come! It’s relative easy: All you have to do is to travel to one of these small villages in the United State like Fresno, find one of these empty houses with its big swimming pools, clean the pool and start to skateboard! And if you take some cans with you, you could paint the pool afterwards, like street artist D*Face did it some month ago… ...

Have you ever heard something about a crazy game called “Urban Defender”? No? Me neither! But yesterday I read a text about it and thought it might be interesting for you… Urban Defender is not that classical game, young people playing in the streets of their quarter, it’s something more! It combines action, tactical planning and high-tech: *“Urban Defender is a location-aware game that takes place in cities and towns. The game and its main interface, the ball, are situated inside the real world. Other location based games often only work with displays or have navigational character. ...

I already wrote one or two times about nice parkour and freerunning videos, but this time I will show you the great trailer of a grandiose film about these two kinds of movement in urban space. My Playground is the title of that documentary film, by Kaspar Astrup Schröder. It’s not one of these regular action-videos, but it has a deeper theoretically background… The film explores the way Parkour and Freerunning is changing the perception of urban space and how the space is changing the traceurs and freerunners. Mainly set in Copenhagen the film follows the making of the first dedicated parkour park in the world. Designed by the danish team, Team JiYo. The film also travels around the world to Japan, United States, United Kingdom, and China to explore the common understanding of exploring the urban space seen from a traceur and freerunners perspective. ...

Maybe you know the traditional outdoor sport “Capture the Flag”, for those of you who haven’t heard something about it yet, I will say some words about it. “Capture the Flag” is a two teams game. Each have its own flag (or other marker) and the simple objective is to capture the other team’s flag, located at the other team’s base, and bring it safely back to their own base. Enemy players can be tagged by players in their home territory and are temporary out of the game. That’s all! ...