Rococo Stop 3

by Sim Bradley
08 / 08 / 2008

Continuing the second year of the Rococo Rail Tour, a bunch of wakeboarders have once again descended on the not so quaint seaside town of Newquay, for the third stop and to decide the overall tour winner. The thing with doing rail jams like this is it’s difficult to keep things different, and this years trip to the south west has definitely had a feeling of déjà vu. I rolled into town early yesterday morning and headed to the site where I was greeted by the same security guard as last year, wearing the same cowboy hat and oakley’s, there’s the same food stands and bars, the MotoX and mountain bike guys are next door, the music acts playing Boardmasters were reminiscent of a certain welsh festival not so long ago and there are Vans beachballs all over the place. That said, the only thing that does seem to be different is the two rails for the pool gap.

A slightly toned-down version of the Rococo structure has been narrowed with only two rails, but all new with a straight down rail with a decent ollie and an A-Frame with the longest down section we’ve ever seen. Timmy Woodhead and co’ have got this building thing dialed, and the angles and design of the rails could not be more perfect.

Friday’s weather was great, with warm yellow sunshine beaming down and turning all the under-dressed teenagers the same colour as the beachballs, which was great for us and helped draw in the biggest crowd a rail jam has seen. There were so many people crowded around the landing pool stretching back what must have been over 20 meters. We started off with a practice/demo session with build crew testing out their handy work and some of the other riders getting used to the new rails. Terry Hannam showed he’s getting more and more comfortable on these big wakeboard rails, getting a clean 270 shuv out after only a handful of pulls, and is looking like a safe bet for the overall wakeskate title. Lee Debuse is nursing an injured knee after a comp last week in Latvia, but ‘taking it easy’ for LDB is not quite what you’d imagine, with warm up moves like switch 270 on to front board gap 90 out. Matty C arrive in time for the first round of the contest and all I’m gonna say is tomorrows final will be something special. Both Matty and Lee are in contention for the overall win, so expect a long battle with some inevitable upset. More tomorrow.