The Grindhouse Amateur-Battle-Competition

Tags: amateur battle, benni harmanus, chris weber, essen, grindhouse, mark stamer, matthias, ogger, skatefactory, thorsten, under wraps

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Friday, March the 17th; We (Tobi Wollmann, Domi Binder, Chris Behnisch, Daniel Prell and Rica Berthaler) drove to Essen one day before the competition to check out the party location and our hotel.

It took us nearly 7 hours to get from Munich to Essen in our rental car which happened to have no CD player. When we finally arrived in the hotel, Matt Ogger and Mathias Mühlmann from the Grindhouse team had already gotten there together with two girls sharing one room. I guess now we all know why Matze’s nickname is “the player”.

We decided to go to the club which was supposedly the best for the afterparty. Luckily it was not in Essen but in Bochum, a town not too far from Essen. We paid 30€ for the cabs (we were 9 people) to get to the club but hey a good party is worth something. When we got there we quickly found out that it was a great party if you were into goth. We decided to take another taxi to a club called 360 which was supposed to be a cool hiphop club but unfortunately too cool for us. After an argument with the securities we went to a club called “Oberbayern”. To make a long story short we were too sporty for the Oberbayern and the reason that I’m actually from Bavaria didn’t get us in. After not being able to get into 3 clubs, the player went home with the 2 girls and the rest of us finally found a club called Riff where we partied till it closed down.

What a coincidence that we were been able to enter a club only after Matze had left us. Maybe it was because he was smelling strongly like the Jack Daniels that he poured over his pants.

The next morning we found out that our hotel had a sauna and of course we decided to make best use of it.

After this great start into the day we made our way to the Skatefactory to get the competition started. Of course nothing worked like it was supposed to, for instance Thorsten Rüffer, the Grindhouse owner, was ill and thus he couldn’t bring all the stuff we desperately needed.

A lot of amazing amateurs showed up together with some well known pros like Chris Weber, Benni Harmanus and Mark Stamer. The competition started with some amazing music (a theme cd with hits like A-Team, Knight Rider, The Fraggles, The Smurfs,…) and the best Vertgrindcomp.

It was really cool to see that some people still can do sick grinds in vertramps and I I’m not talking about people who wear crashpads and warp elbowpads! The first place was a tie between Sidney Hansen (450 ao topporn) and Tobi Wollman (soyale to ao fishy to budget acid to soyale).Unfortunately Sidney hurt his ankle trying a 630 inspin topsoul so he couldn’t compete in the park competition.

Unknown

Next up was the street qualification. I could bore you by telling you about all the amazing tricks but I doubt that you want to hear every single one. Fact is that 5 people made it to the finals (Timm Kittlitz, Domenik Zielke, Martin, Buggy und Schischi) and Tobi Wollmann and Mr. Koopmann qualified for the street finals during a miniramp session.

The Winner of the Miniramp best trick was Dirty Dirk Schellman who landed some amazing tricks like inspin sweaty, disaster safety true kindgrind…

The streetfinals were sick, Timm Kittlitz landed nearly everything he attempted with lots of speed and style (full true topsoul on the rail, fullcab bs royale to true topacid also on the rail) that he won the competition and joined the ranks of the Grindhouse team!

Dom Zielke took the second place with some amazing spintricks (like outspin sweaty) and Sebastian “Schischi” Siwczinski got third with some nice switchups and tech spintricks!

Dominik Zielke

Domi Binder won a special price for the weirdest slam during the vert competition. He attempted a fakie 540 royale, got stuck behind the coping and did some weird invert to flat transfer.

The last part of the competition was the rail to rail contest. This was the only time the pros where allowed to compete. Benni Harmanus showed some nice tricks and Chris Weber did an amazing transfer from the lowrail over the handrail on the grindbox! Patrick Smith landed some sick tricks (pornstar to tr pornstar). Finally David Tajibaev (USD FLOW) won with a super clean soul to christ backslide. This time Dom Zielke just took the third place while Schischi took second.

After all the competition stress Adiel thought it would be a good idea to skate a little vert. This guy is so amazing, he can land 630 inspin topsoul 3rd try cleaner than most people can do topsoul! He also did some funky stuff like ao topsoul 360 ao topsoul all the way.

After the competition we held the premiere for the new Be-mag DVD “Under Wraps”. We had some problems with the sound but everybody loved the DVD. Especially the Lino/Enanoh section is great. The editing matches the great skating and some of the tricks left people with their jaws wide open:

After the competition we went to the hotel and got the party started!

It was an supersick day and a lot of amateurs showed that they can kick ass! Thanks again to all the sponsors! Thanks to Skatefactory, Groundcontrol, Stygma, USD, Kizer, Undercover (Conference) for making this event possible. Thanks for all the great goodies! Support the supporters! Also I want to thank some very special people like Thorsten Rüffer from Grindhouse for letting me organize all this and Maik Lojewski for the help.

See you next time!

- Daniel Prell

You can download a trailer on www.grindhouse.de in the Team and Video section.

Photos: Dominik Rietzel

Top: Chris Weber: Dis over the rail to soul on the ledge
Middle: Unknown: Savannah
Bottom: Dominik Zielke: Outspin Sweaty