Without even having visited many of them, it’s easy to pinpoint most European countries’ contributions to the fabric of skateboarding: Spain and France are thinktanks of EuroTech™, England somehow produces incredible skateboarders despite miraculous climate and spot-related odds, Scandinavians are tall, love wet cement and routinely rewatch Eastern Exposure, as do Belgians and the Dutch (+ Youness…Weiger…), Italians are the byproducts of the best marble on earth, Germans are a hodgepodge of all the above, and everything east of Austria, whose skaters are benefactors of modern architecture’s greatest unintentional skatepark, is pretty much just Russia. Who knows what goes on there…
If there was some hypothetical secret level of New Jersey crust that gets unlocked when you do a trick on the biggest piece of shit that even Fred Gall backed down from, it probably looks like the spots in Toló, a new video out of Budapest. 1) These Hungarians definitely watch the same Quim Cardona parts before skating as the In Crust We Trust dudes. 2) Their entire video is built around 5050 / cool ollie / 180 / wallride-heavy trick repertoires, because these spots look way too harsh to attempt anything close to technical on. 3) They even embrace the “scum” title, much like a prominent Garden State media institution. Hungary = New Jersey of Europe, at least as far as skateboarding is concerned?
The word “raw” gets overused these days, but it’s hard to think of something as awesomely unrefined as this video.
The only real criticism is that they should have better timed the release of Toló alongside that two-week period when “normcore” was the internet’s buzzword, as this vid has the most fashion indifferent wardrobe supervision ever.