Haro UK Team Report

“The HARO team spent a few days traveling to several UK skateparks recently. In three days the crew of Ryan Nyquist (USA), Anthony Pill (UK), Ben Shenker (Hungary), Stefan Geisler (Germany), Senad Grosic (Austria) and HARO UK riders Ben Hennon and Ben Manuel hit the Upton park (ran by the Manuel family), the Worx park in Leeds, the brand new RuffRide park in Liverpool and the Interact park in Burnley before going to Coventry for the annual Bike Show contest.”"The parks were all different ones from the venues visited on the 2003 UK tour. It’s amazing how good all these places are. The Upton park is rather small but fits the little community well. It’s indoors (with a vert ramp waiting to be completed outside) and that is very welcome in a country like England. Not that we experienced much rain but we did not have any outdoor sessions planned on this little tour. Stop 2 was at The Worx in Leeds, which was an incredible place. With a rumored 200.000 British Pounds in material alone it had something for everyone. Ryan Nyquist’s bike had not shown up when he arrived so he got to ride a stock Nyquist Pro bike. It didn’t show he was on a stock bike because his flairs, 720-s, flips and 360 variations were nothing short of amazing. Senad Grosic went for doublewhip tailtaps and was giving flairs a try and pulled decade jumps, no-handed flips and decade airs on the wooden rhythm section. Ben Hennon is non-stop. Throw a ramp at him and he’ll whip it, flip it or transfers from it to another ramp. No half-ass stuff when Hennon hits the course. After a three hour evening session with the locals it was back to the hotel. It was good to catch up with everyone after a long winter. Stories were exchanged until the early hours. Time to hit the sack for a few and get ready for RuffRide in Liverpool. This new park wasn’t even open to the public yet. It had more of a contest style ramp set up with a spine miniramp in one corner and a kids section in another. Good PA system and all. The afternoon was a private session used to shoot some ads. With noone there, it really felt like a private session on the playground. The evening session started at 6pm and the locals showed up to ride with the HARO guys. Stefan Geisler was doing alley-oop nosewheelies and nosepick tailwhips in the mini and Pill went all out with x-up handplants, no-handed and no footed balanced toothpicks, tailwhip to fakie in the mine and tailwhip to manual. You know he’s tech. Ben Shenker did one-handed fufanu’s on a bar and flips + x-up 360-s over the box. Also Ben couldn’t believe the park situation in the UK and wished he could beam just one of them over to Hungary. Since we were in the town of the Beatles and it was my B-day, we were going to look for the Beatles cafe to do some celebrating. We had not seen anything touristy other than the white van, the hotel and the parks, so a few snapshots of the Beatles place would be cool. Ahh, we found a happening bar andnever looked any further. So much for tourist stuff but we did manage to get some good party shots. Waking up the next morning took a little longer. Got out of there at midday and had a fantastic BK whopper brunch (yuk) at the exit 29 services. One more hour to drive and we arrived at Interact in Burnley. Another unbelievable place with the best wooden bowl I’ve ever seen. We chilled a bit before we got the bikes out but it didn’t take long before Ryan was doing 7 feet high flairs on his own bike (it had arrived by this time). Senad and Pill joined the flair session. Senad came real close and Pill pulled his first flair at the Interact bowl and was stoked. Next to the bowl was a mini ramp and a big street course. A session there, with Hennon and Manuel doing crazy transfers, wrapped up the day as far as riding goes. We had some pizza and a couple of Stella’s and left for the Bike Show in Coventry in the white 20 passenger Ford rental tour van. It was a fun few days on the road. Thanks to everyone for the good times.”