#TRENDWATCH2019: The Road To A Post-ABD Society

On one of the days that we were in Vancouver earlier this month, we met up at that famous brick bank spot seen in countless Canadian videos. (It is one of the few recognizable downtown Van spots that is not knobbed.) Each straggler running from the fear of the night before would show up to the spot, and share the same observation:

“Wow, Leon’s trick was fucking crazy.”

At the top of the bank is a small fountain that separates it from a wall made out of a bagillion tiny rocks. In Vans’ Courtesy video from February, Leon Chapdelaine wallrid it in justifiable slow motion.

Eventually, one of latest arrivals to the sesh had to burst our bubble: “Riley Boland already did that years ago.” It was even on a Color magazine cover. He indy-grabbed while doing it, but yeah, that wall has been rid.

Nobody changed their opinion. Leon’s trick was fucking crazy.

No disrespect to Riley Boland; this just seems to be the new norm while discussing insane skate tricks. In an era when literal hours of skateboarding are uploaded to the internet in a day, who can be expected to remember every little trick in every little video. The Gang Corp dudes are on record saying that they don’t care about ABDs. Michelle from Antisocial doesn’t care either, especially when the rise in women picking up skateboards pretty much guarantees that whatever they do won’t look anything like what came before them.

People know not to do something that was on a Thrasher cover, or someone’s ender, but that leaves a lot of leftover tricks’ toes to step on. You already know that the bike locks affixed to the Columbus Park rail years ago were put in place to minimize A.B.D. overlap, and luckily, that practice has not become the norm. Ben Kadow has taken it upon himself to police the first-ness his accomplishments on social media — albeit for a melon grab smith grab maneuver that seems a bit TOO specific for the offending party to plead ignorance on. Are cease and desist orders on skate tricks an inevitability of our remaining decades on a habitable earth?

Kids, right? But were we not the ones who clamored on for years about how we’d rather watch Gino push — a trick that has no-doubt been done before? Is our stubbornness in the face of progression not a tad bit responsible for the culture being ripe for A.B.D. scrolls to become obsolete?

Have any of you watched a rollerblade video? Probably not, right. In making this mildly popular meme, the
QS account’s algorithm got all confused and began serving a steady stream of inline footage to the feed. Caught in a glimpse of another world, rollerblading’s present reminded me of skateboarding’s never-ending quest for N.B.Ds: a lot of extra long rails with extra long kinks, and combo tricks that never needed to be combined.

You’ve no doubt heard those very same Gino push truthers pining for a time before skateboarding became cool — when skaters were “outcasts” that hot people in expensive clothes wanted nothing to do with, and the only people skateboarding did it because they truly loved it.

And then it became obvious: the only way to be a skateboarder in 1992, is to become a rollerblader in 2019.