For centuries of skateboard history, the picnic table had been our pop measure of record. Doing a trick over a picnic table meant dominance of a trick on flat. Meticulous records were kept of what tricks had, and had not been done over them.
Then suddenly, picnic tables fell by the wayside as our go-to measuring stick. A September 2018 Pew Research poll commissioned by the Schoolyard Equipment Association of America (admittedly panicked by the under-reportage of Christian Maalouf’s fakie flip NBD) revealed that Torey Pudwill’s two-punch ender at the end of his 2011 “Big Bang” part was the last time 56% of the general public had jotted down a trick over a table in their NBD notebooks. 2011!
(Picnic table lines were excluded from this study, and are a different genre entirely.)
Someone qualified to speak on the difficulty of skating over both trash cans and picnic tables even recently observed that “no one’s tre flipping a can off the flat in the world – believe me” when qualifying which was more difficult. With skateboarding getting bigger, faster, better each passing year, it only makes sense that the industry would abandon the picnic table system in favor of one that kept up with changing times. You’ll notice this week’s #countdown is a reflection of the trashcan’s newfound dominance — even onetime beacons of picnic table skating like Gardner School are being interpolated to reflect Josh Kalis manuevers over yesteryear’s trash.
