This is the version of the 2-Hip Meet the Street comp that I edited for the 2-Hip season video. That video is now on YouTube as 2-Hip BHIP. This was the first street contest most of us remember, though Dave Vanderspek put on one or to regional street comps in NorCal earlier.
Everybody was looking forward to this contest at the time, because we had no idea what was going to happen. Dave Vanderspek and Eddie Roman were known as street riding guys before this, though it was something all of us did daily. Wall rides had been a thing for a year or so, fakie wall rides were really new. Abubacas had been a trick on vert for a year and a half. None of us had seen a magazine photo of a wall ride more than 2 1/2 feet high in a magazine, before this contest. It's hard to explain now how new all of this was then.
Street riding wasn't really a thing yet, no one had any ideas where the limits were. Peg grinds were done on vert ramps, but no one really did them on street. It was two year after this contest that the first handrail peg grind was caught on video. We honestly had no idea what the obstacles would be, who would be the standout riders, or what new tricks we would see. This was one of the most fun contests I ever went to.
I'm the guy ghost riding his bike into the wall in the blue shirt. I did other stuff like sketchy footplant tailwhips, but decided to only put myself in the video doing something goofy. There were so many riders no one expected were doing cool stuff that day.
San Francisco innovator, Dave Vanderspek, was one of the first guys to do hard tricks on street, going back to 1982-1983. He does the bar endo on the box at 3:55. Freeze that shot, look how edged he is. That's some of the earliest roots of street riding, doing flatland tricks on a sketchy or high spot. Dave and the Curb Dogs showed us all footplants and blunts on parking blocks early on, too. Vander represents the deepest roots of serious street riding.
The other guy we all expected to rip it up that day was Eddie Roman, he got the first wall ride photo in FREESTYLIN' (on the Jinx Bank in Redondo). Eddie put walls in play, and that changed riding forever. I love Eddie's 180 to backwards bunnyhop off the box at 3:55, that's the kind of classic "Eddie Roman stuff" many of us expected. But guys like magazine guy Scott Towne(2:57), ramp rider Todd Anderson(2:10), Orange County local George Smoot (1:25), 2-Hip guy Kevin Martin(2:46), San Diego basher Pete Agustin (4:02), and "Conan the Bikebarian," pro racer/bodybuilder Rich Bartlett (3:12) ripped it up that day. Vic Murphy also ripped, but somehow we didn't get much footage of him. Mike Golden, the young vert rider from NorCal, was the only guy who jumped the roof of the car to flat. All kinds of BMXers threw down that day.
Craig Grasso (4:11)was known for being weird, artsy, and riding everything pretty well, and he was a standout rider all day. I spent a lot of time riding with Grasso in 1986, and I knew he was a great street rider. But he was way better than we all expected him to be in Santee. Another rider no one really expected to flat out rip at the Meet the Street was R.L. Osborn (3: 37). We all grew up looking at R.L.'s photos in the magazines, but he was believed to be more or less retired by 1988. R.L. came out and showed off 15 years worth of BMX skills applied to new obstacles.
The trick of the day went to Englishman Craig Campbell, with the wall ride to 360 (4:53), or 540 wall ride, we didn't know what to call it. That trick blew everyone's fucking mind. Craig got the trick of the day, no doubt. But the man of the day, which oddly surprised a lot of us, was Dave Voelker (1:07). We all knew Dave was a great ramp rider, and flat out crazy on his bike, but he wasn't one of the first guys that came to mind when someone mentioned street riding, before this contest. But Dave's insanely high wall rides, big jumps, and all around aggroness, made him the man of the day in Santee.
Yeah, this was his stomping grounds, but no one stomped like Dave that day. From Santee on, Dave was the first name that came to mind when street riding was mentioned. It sort of seemed like a changing of the guards in that way. The earliest pioneers of really pushing street, like Dave Vanderspek and his Curb Dogs, and Eddie Roman, handed the torch to guys like Dave Voelker, Vic Murphy, and Craig Grasso to really push the level of street riding as it morphed into its own genre.
Pretty much everyone got really psyched on street riding that day, and that's the work of Ron Wilkerson and the 2-Hip crew, for putting on this Meet the Street, and the ones that followed. This contest changed BMX freestyle forever. A year later the bike industry decided BMX and freestyle were dead, and turned their attention, and their money, to mountain bikes. Freestyle went underground, and street riding was a big part of the down years.
There's another video clip form this contest, edited by Dave Alvarez, our video editor at Unreel Productions, on pro caliber equipment. Here's that clip, go to 4:02.
Here's somebody's home video from that day, that shows several of the pro rider's runs. Check out what happens when Dave Voelker shoots his bike jumping the box. I forgot about that part.
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