The 2000 éS team in Barcelona - Eric Koston, Rodrigo Tx, Rick McCrank.

In the year 2000, we organised a filming mission to Barcelona. I had previously been on a mission with Arto and Kerry Getz the year before, and was so hyped to bring Koston, McCrank and Tx, who would kill all the perfect spots of BCN. At the time, not much people at all had been there to enjoy the perfect spots. The ledges at Macba still needed to be waxed. We even managed to arrange the coming of Tom Penny, to skate with us. At that time, he was still super elusive, hard to connect with, and virtually impossible to film. Planets were getting aligned. I was certain this mission who be highly productive and epic.

Tom was coming by car , from Bordeaux, with some friends, and Theo Hand who lived with Tom in France, to capture whatever he could with Tom, for the Flip video. When they arrived on the second morning, Tom got out of the car, said hello and told me he just sprained his ankle at 6 AM that day. He explained that he jumped a big between some rocks. I couldn’t believe it, and didn’t understand really what happened. Jumping some crazy rock? At 6AM? Next to Salvador Dali”s village, Cadaqués? Your ankle is fucked, you can’t skate? That was a such huge disillusionment. Tom was here with us, finally, but couldn’t skate!!! The rock jump is the one in the Sorry video. I often go to Cadaqués, and see the rock all the time. The gap to clear is huge. Few months ago, I finally got on top of the rock to look at it. No one would want to try that jump. But Tom Penny did. He thought he could do it. Well, he did, he got hurt, but it could have been much much worse!!!

Anyway, so one soldier was down. To my big surprise, the planets were indeed not as aligned as I thought, and this filming mission proved to almost be a fiasco. Somehow, Koston was hating on the spots... Macba, “the ledges suck”. Eric was really not in a good mood.... He was not enjoying himself. Most sessions were a struggle for him. He even had some break downs and freak outs while trying some stuff, because we had to try to skate and get stuff, but he wasn’t into it. So it was like everything was imposed to him. That negative energy rubbed off on McCrank. I didn’t understand why things were going so wrong. It was like cooking with all the best ingredients, and fucking up your recipe. Rick got sucked up in that mood. I kept pushing to get things done, and that would make things worse.

They were over it. A lot of cool tricks got attempted, but without success... At least, Rodrigo

didn’t get affected so much, and skated very well, and proved that the spots I had for them were really good and had much potential. He saved the trip. You can only imagine the result if everyone would have been feeling at his best, feeding each other with hype and motivation Rick and Eric pushed so that we would leave Barcelona to go to Paris. That’s where they wanted to skate, that’s all they had in mind. So eventually, we left BCN ahead of schedule, and flew to Paris...

Shot & eEdited by French Fred