Eddie Fiola flatland

During the summer of 1985, while I was living in Boise, Idaho, I went on two trips.  Both of those trips were made possible by my "freestyle family," the Bickels.  First they took me to the Venice Beach AFA contest in June of 1985.  Later that summer we went to a then little known town called Whistler, British Columbia, for a freestyle contest held in association with the BMX World's races. 

Jay Bickel and I spent a day and a half staring out the windows of his parents' Mercedes station wagon looking for sasquatch in Idaho, Washington, and British Columbia.  We didn't see one.  We arrived in the ski resort town of Whistler which was pretty much empty in the summer of 1985.  That was fine by us.  Since it was the Bickel's vacation, they landed us a two story suite in the main hotel which had a sauna in the suite among other things.  Once we unpacked, Jay and I took our bikes to the town square area where a bunch of Canadian riders were hanging out.  We soon learned what a Norklifter stem was.  A company in Canada called Norco made knock-offs of all the main parts, including the Redline Forklifter stem, which was real popular then.  There were 40 or so Canadians, a really fun bunch to ride with, and a group the freestyle world didn't even know existed.  Rob Dodds is the one name I remember, though I ran into other Canadians I met on that trip in later years.

Much to our surprise and delight, the GT/Brittania summer tour rig rolled up the second day we were there.  Out of the RV popped Eddie Fiola, the original King of the Skateparks himself, and East Coast pro Chris Lashua.  They had a few days off while doing shows at the World Expo (or whatever) happening in nearby Vancouver.  That night, with no ramps set up, we got the typical flatland jam circle going.  Much to everyone's surprise, Eddie Fiola rode out and busted out a bunch of flatland we didn't know he could do.  He wasn't known as a flatlander at all to us kids who relied on FREESTYLIN' magazine as our lifeline to the sport. OK, I think he got a cover doing a gut lever once, but that was all we'd seen.  But having done shows for several years already, he had a smooth and very well dialed bag of tricks.  The one that blew us away at first was his rolling moonwalk.  We'd never seen that.  We all started yelling when he busted that out.   We all looked at each other, "Fiola rips on flatland?  Really?"  His tricks weren't super hard for the most part, but he did everything smooth and with his characteristic style.

There is one flatland move of Eddie Fiola's that always blew me away, though.  He would either rollback off a quaterpipe or snap a front wheel 180, then he'd roll backwards standing on the back pegs, and then go up into a backwards, 1 foot nosewheelie.  And he would always get nearly upside down on those things, and he could ride them quite a ways.  No one did that trick like Eddie Fiola, and I never even came close to learning it, though I tried for a while.

The few days we all had both riding and just hanging out with Eddie and Chris Lashua were epic memories for our weird, mostly unknown, group of riders from the Northwest.  I wasn't part of the industry then, I wasn't that great of a rider at all, but Jay and I had a blast hanging with that Pacific Northwest and GT/Brittania posse.  Even with all the cool stuff that came after, that's still one of my best riding memories.

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