BELGIUM SCENE REPORT

A mini-ramp contest took place on the last day of April in my hometown, Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium. The mini-ramp is 7 years old and is still one of the best spots if you want to have a good session under the trees with a bunch of friends. The idea was to organize a relaxed day with skateboarding and music. So did we. The contest had no judges but the skaters themselves. You entered a session of six people, and after 12 minutes of skateboarding, you had to fill out a paper with the best skaters of your session, except you.

The musical part was prepared the day before. We built an extention to the platform in order to have the DJs and bands playing right there, one meter from the coping. We programmed two concerts. We had a local band played during the semi-finals, and a fucking super-energic skatecore band from Hasselt played during the finals and the TEXAS DEATH MATCH.

We wanted to have trophies for the three best skaters, and to distribute the rest of the prices randomly, as a lottery. For the trophies, I asked a friend to make three sculpted hands, showing one, two and three fingers, then I went to the closest hospital to make them cast by some nice and experimented nurses!

We had damn good skateboarding sessions, half a fight (check the pics...), three DJs playing all day. The rule was: as long as there's music, there's skateboarding! So the band played their 20 minute set and the 8 finalists went crazy. Right after that (yeah, RIGHT AFTER!), they started their set again for the Texas Death Match, where anyone could enter the session - I took the opportunity to leave the microphone and join the session...

The day was a complete success and we ended it going for downhills and skating some local mythical spots in the city until 2am! So I won't write any more words and I'll let you enjoy the pics. You can also find a lot of pictures at http://users.skynet.be/aloha/contest.

Thanks.

- Pierre Jambé