george crosland photo blog

Danny Tuoma, Christian Hosoi and Rune Glifberg top the podium in Peoria Arizona’s Rio Vista park on Saturday. Ok wait, so you may have a few questions. What the heck is a death race? Well a death race is an extremely unique hi-speed racing course timed and set up by Dave Hackett and Steve Olson. Dave Hackett just did the loop at 45 years of age and Steve Olson was world champ of skateboarding in 1977. Basically the course is a series of cones placed in the street course up on the tyrannies. Easy right? Wrong! The course looks simple but a lot of the ams could not even finish it and some of the pros had to run through it a few times to even get all the cones. We are talking about legit pros too kids, not just some hacks; running this course was no walk in the park.

So why were all these guys in Arizona in the first place? They were here for this event and the Kronik Desert Dog Bowl contest taking place tomorrow. Basically, the best transition skaters in the world invaded Phoenix and everyone had a hell of a good time. It may be hard to comprehend that running cones is fun but it looked like a blast.

The ams, or Open class opened it up and a lot of those guys had troubles getting through the course. I was thinking this is really weak. The action got better as the ams got it down. The pros took too the course for practice and it basically a series of pro skater freight trains trucking through the course. One to Eight skaters would go in succession, sometimes they all made and sometimes someone in the pack would sketch and cause a high speed pile up. When the timed runs started going down it was basically the fastest man wins. A lot of people came really close but a relative unknown, Danny, took it with Christian and Rune Glifberg taking second and third respectively. Had to be a good day for Danny. It was a great event for everyone involved.

These things always look unreal

Driving out there on I-10 took me through Banning where this fire had killed 4 firefighters the day before. It was pretty wild – fire was burning out of control everywhere, often close to the highway. Not just one fire but like 30

Christian Hosoi powers through the hardest turn on the course with mega style. Holmes was so frickin’ smooth which explains how he took 2^nd place with a time of 20.25 seconds

Hosoi leading a train with Jim Gray, Steve Steadham, Lance Mountain and others trailing as Jimmy The Greek cheers em on

Lance Mountain looking smooth

Danny Touma gets into the Halloween spirit in practice and gets into 1^st place with a time of 20.1 in his timed runs

Dave Hackett helped set up the course

Bruce Adams followed by Jimmy the Greek. Bruce found his way here from his 88 acre farm in Ohio also known as Skatopia

Steve Steadham was in second place for a while but got knocked off the podium

Rune Glifberg skates so smooth so it should come as no surprise that this tranny killer got a time of 20.4, good enough for third

Screamin Lord Salba working those Indy’s

Benji Galloway

The winner Danny Tuoma

Olson and Hackett running the show