In BMX, tricks come and go. I think back on the tricks that were cool to learn when I started riding and most of them are tricks that kids today would never bother to learn. And when I think of the tricks kids learn today within their first year or two of riding, a lot of them are things that didn’t even exist 10 years ago when I started! It’s kinda fascinating to watch tricks become popular overnight and then plummet into obscurity 6 months later. And with that in mind, I decided to craft this list of 10 tricks that were at one time, big and are now, not so big. This isn’t a list of tricks I hate (truthfully I’d love to see people start doing more peg chings) and I’m aware there are probably plenty of people who still do all of these tricks. This is merely my look back at some of the tricks that have come and gone over the years. Oh and thanks to Keith Roman for involuntarily supplying the photo!
Manual To Nowhere 180
Do you remember the manual 180 explosion of the early 2000′s? I think Brian Castillo invented the manual 180 in the 90′s but it remained untouched by all but a few for many years. Then trend setters like Brian Wizmerski and Oliver Leonard took it under their wings and began to do the trick out of almost anything. Often not even off a curb or into a wedge. Kids noticed, and kids will be kids, so the kids copied it. Pretty soon kids realized that the manual 180 wasn’t really that hard at all. And it got over-done. Really bad. Along the way a lot of really technical, amazing stuff happened that included the trick (Chase Hawk doing 360 nosebonk to manual 180′s over spines stands out in my mind). But like most tricks that get really big really fast, it quickly faded away. I recall a Ride BMX article on their website in which Chris Doyle said that he hated seeing manual to nowhere 180′s (or was it Taj? Or Aitken? It’s a distant memory) and it seemed like that really turned people off to the trick. Nowadays manual 180s are still really common, but their inbred “to nowhere” step child is rarely seen.
X Up Ride
The x up ride gained some popularity around the time that the manual 180 became popular. Which is weird, because the x up ride 180 is really just a way easier version of the manual 180 (you have to pull up your front end to do a 180 out of an X up ride. It’s like the same trick minus the balance point). Edwin was really the reason this trick caught on (his part in the first Animal video featured him doing an uprail to x up ride 180 and a feeble toothpick tap to x up ride 180) but a few months later in an interview he mentioned that he actually hated the trick and wished he had never filmed it. People were already slowly becoming turned off to the trick due to it’s overall level of cheesiness but Edwin turning his back on it really put it under the dirt. These days it is almost never seen, although I would be wrong not to mention Chris Neighbors who has done some pretty dope x up ride variations in recent web videos.
The Peg Ching
This trick has many names. The peg ching, the peg tap, the peg chink (the racist anti-Asian version). It emerged in the early 2000′s along with the manual 180 and quickly took over every video out. Doing a barspin to tailtap? Why not smack your peg on the coping on the way out! Doing a deck manual and looking for a way to make the clip a little bit prettier? Lean in and bang your peg on the coping on the way up. If you’re doing a rail and there’s a curb within 3 feet of where you’re landing, you might as well spice up our trick and smack it with your peg on the way down. I remember riding at the Rye Airfield around 2001 and seriously every kid in the park was doing a peg tap in one form or another. But the backlash came just as quickly as it’s popularity had grown. Butcher cried foul in an interview, claiming that it ruined otherwise clean tricks. Soon the trick had all but disappeared. You still see downside versions go down frequently but the days of peg tapping out of every quarter pipe trick are seemingly over. For now.
The 360 Tire Slide
Remember this one? It became popular for such a brief period of time that it’s almost hard to remember who even did it. My bad memory recalls Will Taubin, Brian Kachinsky and Adam Banton all doing it at one point or another. The reason this trick didn’t last long was obvious… it emerge years after Edwin re-invented the 360 bunnyhop (by doing it fast, clean and smooth down stairs). The 360 slider is uglier, easier and causes you to lose speed which is rarely a good thing. Karl Poynter is still keeping the 360 slider alive, but for the most part it’s short reign is a distant memory.
The No Footer
During the Don’t Quit Your Day Job era the no footer was a standard street trick. George D, Joe Tiseo, Brian Castillo and Bob Scerbo all did it at one time or another. It was ridiculously easy but pretty fun and was a nifty way to spice up any ledge or curb trick. The no footer died for one reason and one reason only:
The Kickflip
The kickflip is a pretty easy trick to be sure, but it clearly dominated the no footer in every way. It looked better, it was harder and it had an actual complete motion to it unlike the no footer which at times, was sort of a judgement call on whether your feet came off far enough. Although it was invented many years earlier by Luc-E, the kickflip took on new life once guys like Mike Griffen, Jim C, Will Taubin and Edwin started to do it in and out of grinds (they also did it in a fundamentally different way than Luc-E did his… Luc-E would basically smack his rear foot down on the back pedal causing the cranks to spin, but the new school way to do it was to flip the cranks back with your front foot which was much more consistent and easier to do in a bunnyhop). But then Edwin stopped doing them and the masses followed… within a year or two of it’s advent, the kickflip had all but disappeared. It had a few other problems as well though. It was almost impossible to take a good photograph of, a lot of times it was hard to even notice it in a video clip (videographers of the day made liberal use of the slow-mo feature) and the bunnyhop tailwhip was starting to gain popularity which made the kickflip look like child’s play in comparison. There are still a few people keeping it alive but the trick’s glory days are clearly in the past.
The Half Barspin
A few years back I was watching S&M 4 at someone’s house with a few people Troy McMurray’s part came on and the youngest kid there (probably 13 at the time) asked “is he landing with his bars backwards on purpose?” I won’t even bother letting you know that improved barspin technology killed the half barspin (whoops, just did) but I will mention that I did half barspins for a good solid year, completely unable to get the bars the whole way around, then I got a longer frame and learned full bars the next day. Keep in mind I had a solid foot of seatpost and my bars were probably 19″ wide like the true Ratboy disciple I was.
The Abubaca & The Fufanu
These two tricks with silly names used to be pretty much the bee’s knees when it came to skatepark riding. You couldn’t flip through a BMX magazine without seeing a fufanu on a backrail. These days they are far less popular, pretty much completely because a gigantic portion of riders took their brakes off. And since all the cool pro dudes don’t have brakes and consequently don’t do these tricks, as a result even the kids with brakes aren’t likely to want to learn to abubaca a backrail since none of their favorite riders do it. These two tricks are far from dead, but their popularity has decreased so dramatically over the past few years that they definitely deserve a spot on the list.
Smithing Round Rails
When Can I Eat? came out, this was the trick to do… Lino and Corey Martinez were both smithing rails and it seemed like the logical next step in rail progression. But then reality set in… the trick was really, really hard and you were pretty much guaranteed to eat shit many times trying it. Unlike many of the other tricks on this list, smithing rails went out of style just because it was so damn difficult, not because it was easy or played out. It didn’t help that Lino himself stepped up off the rail game. You still see smith’s down rails from time to time and I could definitely see it re-emerging but it might take a few years.
The Luc-E Grind
This is less of a look back in time and more of a prophecy! Don’t worry, I’m not delusional. I know the Luc-E is still hot. But bear with me and note the characteristics listed above that killed many other tricks. Tricks like the kickflip and the peg tap skyrocketed to popularity very quickly after existing, but not being popular for many years… much like the Luc-E grind (which has existed since the mid 90′s courtesy of John Engelbert but never really went much farther than being slid back and forth on mini ramps). Similar to the kickflip and the peg tap, the Luc-E grind is really a pretty easy trick. Almost anyone can Luc-E grind a flat ledge (it becomes much more difficult once you take it to a rail, but still). And most importantly, it’s just overdone. It seems like everyone is firing out a Luc-E 180 on a flat ledge in their video parts these days, and over-saturation will kill even the best of tricks.
The Luc-E grind does have a selling point that the peg tap and kickflip can’t touch however… it’s photogenic. It fuses together the aesthetic appeal of a nosedive with that of a handrail or down ledge. Whereas a peg tap is pretty much never photo worthy and a kickflip is incredibly hard to capture at all, the Luc-E grind is definitely one of the better looking grinds. That alone may grant it an extended stay in the realm of trendy BMX tricks, but I think we’re already starting to feel a backlash against it and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it continue to fade away over the rest of 2009.
So there you have it. What do you think? Do you completely disagree one one or more of these tricks? Got any glaring omissions? Let me know in the comments.
