FRANCE HAS SKATEBOARDERS

Then he explained that there were actual honest-to-god skateboarding scenes (i.e. with skateboards) in every major French city and we took a large, stainy handkerchief out of our shirt pocket to help mop hisself up. Now that we’ve seen the footage he shot over there, we’d like to extend an apology to the frogs for unfairly disparaging their ability to thrash. But only that. You guys are still blowing it with the music. Here’s a little more from Chris to “set the stage”:

No argument need be made for how good France is for skating. Paris has several of the world’s best street spots, Lyon is the center of the French Skate industry, and Marseilles has some of the best concrete ever poured. There is probably more to France than these three cities, but this is where we went and we were blown away by how much good skating went down.

In Paris we ran into a young man named Joseph Biais, who didn’t mind being forced to skate for the camera by us and his buddy Samir Krim. Samir was part of Infamous, a cult board company out of NYC,  and has been holding it down in Paris for years. He showed us all the landmark ledge spots from the 90s heyday of Parisian skating. Then soft-spoken legend Stephane Larance stopped by to show us Le Dome. Stephane has spent the past 15 years dismantling every square inch of this spot, so he’s as close to an expert on it as it gets.

One thing that everybody kept bringing up was how we must go to Lyon. People constantly mentioned Lyon, and its importance to French skating. It wasn’t overbearing, and I really didn’t quite get it until we arrived there.  One of them should have taken me aside and said, “listen keed, when you get to Lyon you’ll meet Jeremie Daclin, the man who started the most relevant European board company ever and basically busted all the big shit all over France, you’ll get to go JB Gillet’s home spot and get the scoop on it from French Fred, and you will get to skate the best mini-ramp ever in an old factory where the first motion picture was made but is now inhabited by gypsies who trade auto parts for their campers.” The best part is that there was way more than this. Lyon is also the culinary capital of France, and after a long of skating the good men at Antiz guided us to there favorite restaurant, Le Comptoir du Vin, where we downed copious amounts of Cotes du Rhone and feasted upon plates of steak tartare. It was a nice last taste of olde-style Europeans sophistication before diving into the ruggedness of Marseilles.

The Prado Bowl in Marseilles is home to some of the  greatest transition skating that ever went down. Every one knows about all the legendary skating from Wade Speyer, Phil Shao, John Cardiel, and all of the other US pros that are on the “gnar bucket side of things”.  However, the people that are there all year round skating at the heart of the this place. Mehdi Salah seems to be the mayor of the Marseille scene. Beside his involvement in contests at Prado, he also headed up his crew to build the extremely hard-to-skate DIY spot “La Caverne”.

Anyways, that’s France for you. When you are done watching all of these episodes multiple times please look up all these guys, because they are worth checking out some more.