Parking Garage Skateboarding - High Rise Thrills

Sacramento speed freaks are bombing the capital. They have been for years – mostly targeting downtown parking garages after hours when there aren't a lot of cars around.

"Bomb," in the lexicon of the skateboarders doesn't mean what you think.

Bomb: verb, to go down a hill fast on a skateboard. Usage: Let's bomb that hill.

Given Sacramento's flat terrain, multilevel parking garages are the logical venues for local skaters craving speed. Complete article from the Sacramento Bee.

Signal Hill - 30 Years Later

It was 1975 and skateboarding was hugely popular when Jim O'Mahoney, head of the U.S. Skateboard Assn., got a call from the producer of ABC's television show, "The Guinness Book of World Records." The producer wanted to shoot a skateboarding event for the show.

As a child, growing up in Long Beach, O'Mahoney begged his parents to drive fast over the steepest section of Hill Street, an almost 30-degree incline in Signal Hill that mimicked the feeling of a roller coaster. O'Mahoney told the TV producer he could create a downhill skateboarding race on the steep Signal Hill incline, bordered by oil fields.

Read the rest of the article in the LA Times.

Newton's Playground - Racing Event

"AN apple fell on some bloke's head, budda-bing budda-boong, he came up with the law of gravity."

So reads the promotional material for Newton's Playground, a new festival named in honour of the 17th-century English physicist Sir Isaac Newton.

The event, to be held next year, is not for nerdy science boffins fussing over complex theories of universal gravity. Rather, it is for extreme sports enthusiasts who will don helmets and zoom around the tight corners of Bathurst's Mount Panorama at speeds of up to 125kmh. More.

Event website.