People who change freestyle that you forgot about: Oleg Konings

Go to 1:03 in this video and you'll see the enigmatic Skyway pro Oleg Konings doing a scuff trick.  I can't remember what he called it.  Why is this a big deal?  Because, to the best of my knowledge, this was the first scuffing trick EVER.  I personally saw Oleg doing this trick in 1985, when I first moved to the Bay Area.  He had been doing it a while at that point.  For those of you who found freestyle in the very late 1980's or later, "scuffing" is the act of pushing a foot on a tire, then dragging that foot to control the speed, which helped you keep your balance. 

Right before I left NorCal for my job at FREESTYLIN', Golden Gate Park local Tim Tracy had invented another scuffing trick, it was a forwards side glide with his leg over the handlebars, scuffing on the front wheel.  It was amazing at the time, but like Oleg's earlier scuff trick, it didn't catch on. 
At an AFA Masters contest in Oregon in the spring of 1987, the NorCal crew unleashed the Backyard, and that was the trick that blew up and got the whole freestyle world learning scuff tricks. 

Here's Dennis MCoy in 1987 bustin' some scuff tricks.  At 1:01 in this clip he does a funky chicken, into a spinning front peg scuff thing.  Then at 1:45, he goes into a locomotive, which is what the backyard soon morphed into, thanks to Kevin Jones.   At 1:56 Dennis does the backyard, the trick that started a whole flurry of scuffing moves.  Within a year, scuffing moves started turning into gliding moves, and that was the foundation for all of today's flatland.  And it all started with a weird kid from NorCal called Oleg Konings.

I've got two new blogs now:

Crazy California 43

Stench: Homeless Super Hero- I'm writing fiction now, about the world's first homeless superhero, Stench.