Downhill On Four Wheels

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Have you ever had the experience where you see something on the Internet, something like Italian Spiderman and it's so good you just assume that it's spawned in the far off regions of a place more sophisticated and advanced than your own town? Well, apart from offending your peers, making assumptions like that is just stupid in this day and age. After barely escaping the embarrassment of reporting Italian Spiderman after Today Tonight, we're jumping 'on board' (pun definitely intended) early with You Tube's latest offering.
 
Videos of guys flying down the side of a mountain atop skateboards are great to watch wherever they're filmed but when you know they’re flying down some of Adelaide’s gnarliest hills it makes it that bit more titillating (no that’s not an offensive word). Thanks to the films of Leigh Griffiths you get to ride along with these crazy Adelaideans has they hit high velocity thanks only to gravity. Talking to Leigh about their adventures he told us that they have to be quite secretive about the locations, “A guy up in Queensland recently went ot court for uploading a video of himself speedboarding down a road… a lot of that is because he included the location of the run in the title and description” he said. So if you do recognise the location please keep it to your own speculation rather than post it below this story.
 
We can tell you that the guys take their sport very seriously. Leigh was adamant that the fact that the people in his video have been training for over a year to get this point and take safety very seriously. “Safety equipment is a must,” Leigh told us, “anyone without a proper full-face helmet, special sliding gloves and at least knee pads will not be riding with us”. As well as that they all ride modified and customised boards that are built to sustain speeds of up to 125km/h and with only the wind and maybe a gloved hand or sneaker sole to slow themselves, we're kinda glad we can watch from the safety of our very slow moving office chairs. Thanks to Sighmon over at Home Slice for the heads up on these dudes. Subscribe to their very awesome Adelaide-Centric email here! And check out more on the phenomenon at skateboardracing.org.au