Scene Report: Austria - August 2006

Tags: austrianinlinenet, conference, ignition skateshop, invasion, lui summer, tim helbock, tschini, wolf

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After a very successful tour through the south of Austria, Austrianinline.net, Ignition-Skateshop and Invasion finally managed to organise a tour through the west of Austria.

Antonio busting out a fishbrain and Berni rocking a liu kang air over the hip. All shots by Ernie from Invasion.

After a very successful tour through the south of Austria, Austrianinline.net, Ignition-Skateshop and Invasion finally managed to organise a tour through the west of Austria. Wolf Zapata from Vienna was the mastermind and I love him for that. He managed to keep around 30 Rollerbladers under control, at least as much as to prevent total chaos. We were only touring for five days, but we managed to travel to, to stop at, and skate in over seven different cities.

Wolf and I have been working on a lot of different projects with the main purpose to strengthen the Austrian scene. We have been doing this for years now and we thought we knew almost every rollerblader in Austria. But we were wrong and we are very happy about this. At every stop we met loads of people which we have never seen before. It seems as if the west of Austria still has a lot of potential.

The crew in Vienna representing.

The tour was just crazy and we were fighting our way through the local gangs and the rainy weather. Even tough the weather was pretty shitty there were loads of kids at every stop. On Monday we arrived at the amazingly big pool park in Hard. This park is around 1500 square meters big. Due to the bad weather everyone who was not totally insane stayed at home, but we still managed to skate the whole day and to even pull through a little contest. Tschini from Linz won, Tim Helbock came in on the second place and Jan from Tyrol was placed third. All of them won products by Undercover, USD, Kizer and other Conference companies.

This night and the following night I had over 30 people sleeping at my parents’ house. If I’m honest I was more than just worried about things being damaged, but to my surprise nothing happened! Here I also want to thank my wife Anette who cooked for over 20 guys!!! Everyone who was unexpected had to take care of himself. But this was not to hard to take considering that you could buy beer for only 50 cents.

Chilling at the skatepark.

Everyone who was on the tour, or even just at one stop of it, could see how much closer everyone in rollerblading is nowadays. This kind of tour really helps to bring people together and to make rollerblading more fun. It is amazing to see how much better it is to organise such a tour than to organise a “real street contest”. On the tour everybody could skate and we realized that a lot of people only attend events if they can also skate and not just watch the “pros”. This is what the rolling scene in Austria needs and this is what we will continue to do next summer with the help of Ignition Skateshop, Austrianinline.net and Invasion.

Stay tuned for more news from beautiful Austria… see you next month!

-Lui Summer
For more info and reports on skating in Austria check out www.austrianinline.net.