Ed Andrews: The irrelevancy of contests
Who wins or loses in skate competitions doesn't really make much difference at all.
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Life throws out some very happy coincidences every now and then. And as luck would have it, Andrew Reynolds has just won the Maloof Money Cup in Washington DC, just days before he is appearing on the cover of the new issue of HUCK! We couldn't have timed it better.
It's pretty amazing for someone who doesn't enter many contests and is well into his thirties to turn up at this lucrative skate contest and hammer his way to victory. It was also great to see fellow veteran Ronnie Creager claim second and help teach the kids a thing or two.
But as much as I don't want to detract from Reynold's well-earned victory, the fact that he had the chance to win this is more to do with the dealings of the skate industry than any Rocky-esque triumph over adversity.
You see, there's a bit of battle going on between mainstream skate contests with the Maloof Money Cup and the Dew Tour being shrewdly out-manoeuvred by Rob Dyrdek's Street League contest. As of this year, Street League has added an exclusivity clause to their contracts meaning that skaters can only compete in Street League, so leaving the other contests without many of the high profile pros like Chris Cole and Ryan Sheckler, and the young upstarts like Nyjah Huston and Shane O'Neill who seem to take skateboarding to the next level.
And so this leaves contests like the Maloof Money Cup open to likes of Reynolds and Creager the opportunity to grab some prize money despite not being as technically-skilled and competitively-minded as the new generation of pros – Reynolds told me himself that he couldn't do Street League as he's not consistent enough. This variety may well keep things interesting, but it does go to show that skate competitions results are pretty much irrelevant.
What I mean by this is that a competition's purpose is generally to find out who the best person at a particular sport is. If there are pre-conditions for entry tied into who is sponsored by who, then this barrier immediately makes it not purely about who is the most skilled but who is the most skilled out of those who have commercial interests compatible to the sponsors of the event. The correlation between those on the DC and Monster roster competing at the 'DC Street League Pro Tour fueled by Monster' and those on the Vans payroll competig at the 'Maloof Money Cup presented by Vans' is no coincidence. Just take a look at Greg Lutzka and his sponsor-hopping shenanigans that saw him leaving Street League.
So does competitive skateboarding need a new neutral governing body, something like the TTR World Tour in snowboarding, to help weed out these commercial constraints and settle once and for all who is better than everyone else at playing on a wooden toy?
Fuck no! As far as I'm concerned – and I don't think I'm alone here – leave these contests to their profit and loss sheets. They are just a corporate entity: an exercise in branding, marketing and manufactured fun. People say they need competitions to showcase the sport to help it survive but what they mean is that people doing tricks against each other in a public arena is a good way to keep people buying the stuff they are selling.
Beyond all the money-making and industry concerns that these contests represent, skateboarding has been invented and won't be uninvented any time soon. Whether people get the thumbs up or thumbs down from judges or not for skateboarding will not change this one bit. Some people may like them, some people may not, but it's important to recognise that contests are neither saving or killing skateboarding: they are pretty much just irrelevant when you are out skating for yourself.
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The irrelevancy of contests (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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