Thanks to Vincent Milou for breaking down the session.
Full audio here:
Foto: Clément Le Gall
Um, yeah, no, I didn’t, I never seen the photo of that rail before. We were just skating those ledges at that little plaza in the center, close to the hotel we were staying at with Miles and the whole team. Miles was trying that sick line, and Diego was skating them, and while they were skating, I was looking for, like, a pee spot around the corner, beyond the bushes.
And then I saw some red, like, tubes, red steel, in the back, and I thought I saw a rail. So I was like, “Yo, I’m gonna go check that out.” And when I saw the rail, I immediately was like, “I need to grind this thing.” I kind of got hyped. I called Gabbers, I was like, “Dude, did you see this rail behind the bushes?” He was like, “Yeah, I saw it yesterday,” and we kind of talked about it.
We were like, “Dude, should we skate it?” I was like, “You can go frontside, I’ll go backside,” like I was trying to hype him up to skate. And he was like, “No, all good, dude, you should do it,” which was really cool of him, you know? He was like, “Yeah, skate that rail, sounds sick.”
I had never seen that rail before, and I don’t know, the color caught my eye, and then the dimension of the tube. It’s kind of like big, wider tubes, which I really love for some reason. They’re harder to lock in, but I like the feeling of grinding on them.
It was close to the wall, kind of sketchy, with that little gap between the rail and the ledge behind it. But it was kind of safer because I felt like if I had to fall, I could jump onto the ledge on the other side. The wall usually scratches your arms, but I felt like it could help me to start trying.
And the stairs were really wide, which is also another thing that I like, so if you step off, you can always run down the stairs. Honestly, it was way harder than I thought. The rail didn’t grind really well, and it’s super long, but it was one of the safest kink rails I’ve ever done because of the little lip on the side and the wider stairs.
But then the nightmare started, because first of all, the rail is broken, there are multiple of those rails, but the rail is broken in the middle. So Gabbers helped me tape it together and still stick it, because I guess the rail is too long to exist as one bar, one steel bar, so it’s like multiple rails, but they’re not fixed to each other. There’s a gap between each kink.
The gap was before the kink, if I remember correctly, so you couldn’t do a 50-50 past the first kink and ollie into the other one, because you would have to ollie over the kink into the second down. So we had to tape the rails together and still stick it to make sure I could grind through it.
But then, while I was trying some ride-on grinds, I kind of broke the steel stick, so we had to redo it. It honestly took maybe two hours, because we had to fix the rail twice, and then I had to fix the run-up, because it’s those Spanish tiles, the famous ones that go one way but not the other.
If they go the wrong way, you can’t really roll, if they go the right way, you can. But the problem is, I had small wheels, like 51s, 52s, and they kept getting caught up in those tiles, and before the pop I would kind of powerslide and miss my pop.
The first couple of tries, I couldn’t get on the rail, which was super scary. I kind of missed my ollie in the position where I was gonna pop, I kind of sacked the rail with my butt a couple of times, which was really weird, because usually you don’t really miss an ollie to get on the rail.
But the rail’s good dimension, and yeah, that’s what caught my eye: the red, those long kinks. I was like, “Besides the shitty run-up and the gap between the rails, if we can fix this, it must be super fun to grind.”
And yeah, I ended up doing it three times, because the first two times I really had my hand on the wall a lot. The third time, I kind of touched the wall a little bit, but that was fine, it was more in the movement of my arm, trying to find balance. I touched the wall maybe once, but it was just part of the motion.
It was really fun to grind the whole thing, definitely the longest rail I’ve ever grinded, and one of the most beautiful. We were just skating those ledges before the demo, and we kind of had like an hour and a half to kill, I guess.
Like always, I always wanna skate something before the demo. I don’t know why, the rail was there, I don’t know, it’s my timing in life, it’s weird. I just saw the rail and thought, “Fuck, I’m gonna skate that thing, it just looks so good.”
We saw the rail the night before, and the team was like, “Well, your only chance to skate it is kind of before the demo that day.” I didn’t want to skate it first thing in the morning because I hadn’t skated a rail in a long time, so I didn’t feel like jumping on that rail first thing.
Then they were like, “We could either do it on the way back or on the way to the demo,” but the next day there was a soccer game, so we knew it wasn’t gonna be possible then.
It kind of worked out pretty well, Gabbers helped me out a lot fixing the rail. The whole team was down there giving me motivation because, oh, it’s quite impressive, you have to grind like, I don’t know, 36 stairs total. It’s like a 12-flat-12, or 11-flat-11-flat-12, something super long, I’m not really used to, dude.
And yeah, it’s crazy, you can’t believe it. It was my first time in Madrid, and even though I don’t live far away (Biarritz is only a five or six hour drive), for some reason I never got the chance to come to Madrid before, and I really liked it.
I have a hard time with Barcelona and some other cities in Spain because you always get kicked out, the cops are really hard on you, like the Guardia Civil, they’re not really nice with skaters, especially if you’re French. I feel like there’s a beef between France and Spain most of the time.
I got so many fines in San Sebastian, cops grabbed my board, treated me like shit. Some spots are crazy. But Madrid felt totally different. It felt like a completely new city, something I’d never seen before.
Of course it’s Spain, but it felt a little different. Madrid’s really stylish, the food is great, we had really good times. People are very chill, I was surprised by that. People are very, very chill and seem happy, just being outside. They don’t really care if you skate.
We kind of got kicked out of Congreso one day by a weird cop, but the other one was like, “I’m so sorry for his behavior.” One cop tried to roll over me with his motorbike and told me I was a danger to the population, but he was going hella fast on the little plaza. I was like, “You’re not even supposed to roll here with your motorbike.” Whatever, cops being cops.
But the other guy was super cool, super chill, he’s like, “Ah, sorry, you just can’t skate here, gotta go.” So we left.
Madrid was hella tight, I loved it. I really wanna come back, visit the shop again, and see you guys again. So yeah, thanks for having us. I’m glad I skated that rail.
It just felt like, I don’t think we knew what we were doing when we were doing it, you know? It’s one of those moments where you’re like, “Oh, let’s just fix it, let’s just grind it,” and it took a little bit of time, but it worked.
