I got to go to the AST Dew Tour today here in Salt Lake City. I’ve never been to one of these things, and had no idea what to expect. It was a lot of fun, ended up spending almost all day there. Apparently, there are about 80,000 skaters in Utah, and they were all here today. Holy cats.
In the morning and afternoon I was just hanging out in the venues. There were a lot of corporate sponsors there, and they all had some cool booths setup with some fun stuff. They even had a small mini skate park setup if anyone wanted to grind.
The best part was at night, though. They opened up the arena for the pros to practice skating before the finals tomorrow. I got there just after they started, and the pros were all on a huge half-pipe just screwing around and occasionally doing a cool trick. I managed to take a crappy picture with my cell phone.
Then, a little later, something cool kinda happened. On the other side of the arena was some more ramps and stuff that nobody was using. In fact, there was a bunch of stuff just lying around on the floor. But about a half hour after the practice started, a lone skater showed up and just started pushing around on the ramps by himself. People in the seats got up and started going over to check out was going on, and then when we all figured out it was Ryan Sheckler, the entire arena pretty much moved over to watch.
Ryan did some really sweet jumps, it was way cool. After a few minutes, some other pros came out and joined him out there and we got a pretty sweet show all to ourselves. It was great.
I’m just glad little ol’ Utah could get a great event like this. It was all a lot of fun. The finals for skating are tomorrow afternoon, and they are gonna be on NBC. Right on.