King of Southsea repo part one!!

Flatmatters presents.. The King of Southsea Flatware contest!

Wow! Recovering from one of the best weekends in a long time! King of Southsea rocked and exceded all my expectations leading into this! Fotr all you new school peeps reading this, King of concrete ran for 17 years! It became a bit of a instuition of the English bike riding scene, over the years so many names have attended. The event was primarily organised by my dad, and he’d had enough of the grief, so the event had died, and perhaps needed to..

I got the idea and motivation to bring it back under a similar name, to keep the familiarity that the koc name had. The uk scene needed it, and more importantly the flatland needed to be smack in the middle of a BMX contest!

The weather the week leading up to the event couldn’t have been any worse, in hindsight, it kind of got all the bad weather out the way, and we thankfully had two days of sunshine. And it’s been sunshine ever since, typical September style! Thankfully we had only one lil sprinkle for 2 mins all weekend!

The basic concept for flatland, was to hold the contest in between the ramps where I normally ride, the area is plenty big enough and the atmosphere I hoped would be more intimate and electric!

Portsmouth dnb kindly spun tunes all weekend long free of charge, thanks a lot guys! I know that wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but still I think it led to a great atmosphere! The first event up was Novice flatland up, with only three riders, as Chris Massey got his times mixed up, and Ashley Adams missed the novice class completely! With what was to come I think that was a good thing! Somethings are meant to happen! The format for King of Southsea, was two runs, best run counts! This ran through the entire contest, and seemed to work well! Giving the riders a chance to really go for it!

Jamming with Cunners throughout the weekend! Winding it up, spinning cyborg style!

Dave Cowell from Fareham took first place, with controlled fork wheelies, tailwhips, and won a whole host of goodies from Flatware (our title sponsor), Function flatland, and Deep BMX. Ben Thrower got bullied into entrying by yours truly and it paid off with a second place finish, bunnyhop bars, 180 hops and footjam whips, ending in a flair just for kicks! Good fun! Paul Collins ended up in 3^rd place, and has progressed, working nicely on his forkwheelies.

You’ve probably seen the edit already, but Expert kicked ass and gave us all hope, that there are new kids in the UK coming through, and also older guys getting into and coming to the forefront! This got me psyched! The atmosphere was building, one really nice thing about this weekend was that I noticed all the riders were cheering for each other, I honestly don’t see that very often, I can’t remember the last time actually! The vibe was great, laidback, heavy tunes dropping all day, and the riders responded with some great riding! Yannick Chauvel came all the way from France, sleeping on the common Saturday morning before the park opened, mad man! Yannicks smooth rolling style, two footed pedal steams straddling the house were a definite highlight, he mixed it up nicely with front and back wheel combos, and the judges awarded him with first place and a stack of goodies to take back to France! Congrats Yannick!

After the contest, the TGM guys headed to the Seaside a short distance from the skatepark, Salvador Brown here, brakeless decade in the sunshine! Photo by Vlad.