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October 14th, 2008
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Great skates

Prague's Mystic Sk8 Cup has become a high-flyer on the European circuit

July 2nd, 2008 issue

By Adrian Chen

Photo by David Blazek
Terence Bougdour placed third in the Vertical Ramp Event at the 2007 Mystic Sk8 Cup.
Mystic Sk8 Cup


July 4-6
Štvanice Island
For ticket information and a complete
schedule, check
www.Mysticsk8cup.cz

For the Post
Prague’s premier skateboarding event has come a long way in its 15 years.
In the summer of 1993, a parking lot scattered with small obstacles, a few bands and a handful of American professional skateboarders lured to Prague from a nearby contest in Germany comprised the first Mystic Sk8 Cup event. Today, Mystic Sk8 is a destination in its own right, boasting more than 200 riders from at least 25 countries and a state-of-the-art skate park on Štvanice Island.  
For three days starting July 4, more than 10,000 spectators will converge in a haze of booze, marijuana smoke and music to watch these athletes compete in three events for a $50,000 purse — the largest in the event’s history. “This is bigger than other events in Europe,” says Lukáš Daněk, one of the 15 Czech skateboarders who will be competing in the event. “They don’t get the media coverage like there is [at Mystic Sk8].”
How did a haphazard gathering of friends evolve into one of the premier skateboarding competitions in Europe, and one of three “Grand Slam” events in the World Cup of Skateboarding? The rise of the Mystic Sk8 Cup is inseparable from the evolution of skateboarding in the Czech Republic, which began as a tenuous, even covert affair.  
“The roots of Czech skateboarding go back to 1980, when my older friends were pressing their decks at home and even producing [skateboard] trucks and wheels in state factories,” says Tomáš Rejman, owner of Mystic Skates, one of the largest skateboarding companies in the Czech Republic and the sponsor of Mystic Sk8 Cup competition.
The early Czech skateboard hardware was crude, but communist restrictions made importing high-quality foreign skateboard equipment nearly impossible. According to Petr Neitsch, editor of the skateboarding and snowboarding magazine Free, some of the earliest Czech skateboarders got a boost from an unlikely source: theater impresarios Petr and Matěj Forman, the twin sons of famed Czech film director Miloš Forman.
The brothers became interested in skateboarding while visiting their father in the United States, Neitsch says. “Many of the early Czech skateboarders were friends with them,” he recalls. “Their father was sending them good equipment from America.”
Even for those who were able to make or smuggle equipment, organizing races or fostering a skateboarding community was forbidden. Still, throughout the 1980s, an underground skateboard scene was growing steadily. In the early ’80s, Martin Kopecký, considered by some to be the godfather of Czech skateboarding, secretly organized the Czech Skateboarding Association. The association held slalom competitions and distributed a homemade samizdat skateboarding magazine, Smyk. And, in 1988, Kopecký brought the European Skateboarding Association’s championship event to Prague.
But it wasn’t until after the Velvet Revolution that skateboarding really took off in the Czech Republic. “I think [the increased interest] was connected to the fact that Czech people had less freedom than they wanted,” says Mystic Skate’s Rejman. “Skateboarding is kind of like a freedom sport — not even a sport, but a lifestyle.”
The years after the revolution were a boom time for skateboarding. A wave of new skateparks was built (from two in 1989 to 78 today). Foreign skateboard companies took advantage of the new market and began distributing high-quality skateboard products for the first time. And local skateboard companies were eager to establish themselves on the scene — perhaps too eager. “We were overdosed in the ’90s,” Neitsch says. “A lot of shops are now closing because so many people didn’t know how to sell [skateboarding equipment].”
The quality of Czech skateboarders rose along with interest in the sport. “Every year they are better,” says Daněk, speaking over the phone from a World Cup of Skateboarding event in Rome. Other skateboarders, like Martin Jurášek, have been tallying wins on the European circuit. Today, Neitsch says, there are five or 10 Czech riders who can compete at the international level.
Since 1993, the Mystic Sk8 Cup has been perhaps the only constant in the quickly changing Czech skateboarding world, feeding the local scene and growing stronger from it in turn. The influx each year of talented skateboarders has been invaluable to local riders honing their own tricks, while the Mystic Skate Park — now a permanent installation — receives funding for improvements and repairs from a supportive city government.
While many skateboarding competitions throughout the world are beginning to take on the staid character of golf tournaments, Mystic Sk8 Cup has remained true to its roots as both a world-class competition and a celebration of the Czech skateboard community it helped shape, with music, art and plenty of beer.
“The atmosphere is that it’s not just a contest,” says Neitsch. “It’s a happening.”
Adrian Chen can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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