![]() The next year Burnquist won his first contest against top international competition, and his star rose quickly. "With his switch riding, he had a go for it mentality - 'Make it, or take me to the hospital.'" "I knew he was doing stuff that was light years ahead of what people were doing then, Phillips said. ![]() "He just followed us around."īut Burnquist, then 17, impressed them with his skating. "He was a dirty skate rat dude with two different shoes on," the Thrasher editor Jake Phelps said. Because he could speak English, Burnquist offered to act as translator and guide. Still, he remained unknown in the US until the skateboarding magazine Thrasher led a group of American professionals to Brazil in April 1994. Way had experimented with performing tricks switch-stance standing the opposite way on the board, like switch-hitting in baseball.īut Burnquist took switch-stance further, learning a full repertory of tricks. He was particularly captivated by Way, then a teen prodigy from California. He began skateboarding at 11, and developed a unique style by imitating the exploits of professionals featured in magazines and videos. Last week the Burnquist homestead was a locus for family and friends from Brazil, and industry filmmakers and photographers.īorn in Rio de Janeiro - reared in Sao Paolo - to an American father and Brazilian mother, Burnquist grew up speaking English and Portuguese. ![]() Their menagerie includes two goats, six chickens, two dogs, a cat, a rabbit and a turtle. "It's a playground for us."īurnquist lives among his creations in a spacious two-story stucco house with O'Brien and their six-year-old daughter, Lotus. "It's like a paradise for skaters," said Sandro Dias, a professional who is also from Brazil. The Mega Ramp is the latest backyard creation, adding to an ensemble that includes a 4m-tall ramp with a clamshell shape appended to one end a loop-the-loop with a removable top a 3.6m diameter metal pipe and a corkscrew design that requires an inverted leap from one section to the other. But beginning next month and continuing through the winter, many of them will descend on Burnquist's backyard. Not wanting to risk injury, other elite skaters have been waiting for the end of the competition season. ![]() The only visitor to ride so far has been professional skater and Mega Ramp pioneer Danny Way, Burnquist's lifelong muse. That way it is proven it's an ag building and I happen to skate on the roof." I'll put some plastic on the side and build a greenhouse underneath. "In the conservation plan, the ramps are the agricultural buildings. "I've done some organic farming and I plan on doing some more," he said, explaining how he skirted zoning restrictions. "The wheels are always turning."īuilding a structure of the Mega Ramp's size in an agricultural district required a creative twist typical of Burnquist. ![]() "I trip out on how his mind works," said his partner Jen O'Brien, a professional skateboarder herself. "When I'm risk-taking I feel like I'm alive," said Burnquist, who is also a farmer, pilot, skydiver, musician and restaurateur. BASE is the acronym for using a parachute to jump from fixed objects of a building, antenna, span, earth.īob Burnquist takes in the view from the top of the Mega Ramp in Vista, California. And in March he built a 12m-tall ramp on the rim of the Grand Canyon, from which he launched himself and his skateboard onto a makeshift metal rail, and then BASE jumped 487m to the canyon floor below. He's the only one that can actually start backwards on the Mega Ramp."Ī winner of 12 medals at the X Games, Burnquist performs moves no one else dares try: he has rolled upside down through a Hot Wheels-style loop - backward. "Bob has this ability that transcends traditional vert skating," Tony Hawk, the sport's biggest icon, said of ramp skateboarding. Although not the first - the X Games builds one each year - it is the world's only permanent Mega Ramp, and Burnquist said having it at his home allows him to explore all the possibilities of the sport's most daring discipline. Skateboarder Evandro Mancha goes airborne at the Mega Ramp in Vista, California.Ĭompleted in September after more than a year of construction, Burnquist's Mega Ramp cost US$280,000, part of which was covered by his apparel sponsors Oakley and Hurley. ![]()
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