Occasionally, a work or an artist comes along that is so influential, so inescapable that anything that comes after can’t help but reference it, intentionally or not. Think about how, after The Matrix, every ad on TV seemed to use that same timeslice technique. Or how, after the Strokes, the world drowned in a surfeit [...]

I heard an interesting conversation with a friend recently that got me thinking. We were talking about a well-known up-and-coming ripper (OK, it was Jamie Nicholls) who’d just won a big inner city rail contest. Looking at the coverage, he’d been killing it all day and had deservedly taken home the pay cheque and the [...]

UCI President Pat McQuaid  One of the side effects of spending part of the last year investigating snowboarding in the Olympics has been an unhealthy interest in how other sports have handled this most delicate of transitions. So when I saw this article in Reuters earlier in the year, about how the ICU (International Cycling [...]

The Olympic slopestyle brouhaha and the consistent dissing the ASP has been getting in recent weeks, among other things, has got us thinking about the future for competitive freesports here at ACM Towers. Namely, how is that future going to unfold? Clearly, our sports are massive like never before. But a fundamental problem must be [...]

All was going well. Several of the office guys had got back into skating, and with a few more friends from Brighton we’d started to visit the nearby skateparks: Cuckfield, Crawley, Shoreham Bowl, and Angerming. Yeah we weren’t the Bones Brigade, but we were having fun cruising around the concrete bowls, and riding the mini [...]

Last Monday saw what must have been the highest profile action sports’ (or ‘street sports’, as it was referred to throughout the programme) TV slot ever, with the 90 minute documentary Concrete Circus on Channel 4. Director Mike Christie previously directed Jump London, which followed a couple of freerunners around London, back in 2003. I [...]

This clip has been doing the rounds – the kid is 6 and has apparently been skating for six months. The fact that the board is almost bigger than him, and he still has such a good style, is pretty amazing. World domination beckons.

Tony Hawk is a legend. A true living legend. I watched the show in Brighton a few days ago and though I’ve seen him ride before, it’s always a pleasure to see The Birdman in action – so smooth and flowing and props to all the handplants that were being thrown out. I was lucky [...]

The growth of board sports is a pet topic here at ACM. After all, it has essentially given us a career and many of the most fulfilling moments of our lives. It’s a fascinating subject in its own right, and is something Chris explores thoroughly in his as-yet unpublished history of boardsports, Standing Sideways. So [...]