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Naomi Grigg's skating years

Part 5

by Naomi Grigg

During my pre-inlines years, I had managed to jump at the ice rink one day, but really badly. As in, the ice steward that I showed it to wasn’t completely convinced that I’d left the floor. I did, I know I did – and it scared the living daylights out of me. Within weeks I was jumping like an athlete – we’re talking at LEAST 10cm off the ice. I was feeling really good about this – I hadn’t really seen anyone else doing it, other than one time when I was a kid and was skating at Centre Parks on holiday – a lad in the roller rink area jumped up and actually turned in the air and landed backwards. I remember being stunned and wondering how that was even possible. So I was pretty keen to get on with this jumping thing. By the time I got inlines I was already able to jump from forwards to backwards, but I discovered with the help of the sports hall floor lines that I was unable to jump on command. If I decided to jump over a particular line, I became tense but was pretty much ok – but the minute I put something ON the line, there was no chance. It could be just a piece of rope running along the floor, but I just couldn’t. At the last minute I would turn away, until I started managing to make myself go over the rope, but even then I would do a sort of chickening out leaping step over the rope instead of an actual jump. Some people when they are faced with a situation like that, find that they unlock their true reserves, and it makes them do what they would feel uncomfortable doing if the obstacle wasn’t there, but I don’t fit into that group. I fall into the chicken group. That made me mad. So at school that became my main thing, and eventually I was lining up the sports hall benches to see how many I could jump over (they were next to each other, not on top of each other…) I was doing 5 one day and finally broke my skates.

It was around this time that I had started going to a skate park in Bath early on Sunday mornings. I had seen a magazine called ‘1st Inline’ and it had loads of pictures of people doing tricks on ramps, and I knew I would just love to be able to do those things. One of the pictures was labelled as being ‘Victoria Park, Bath’, so off I went. Over the course of a few months I had learned to drop in to the mini & midi, 180 at either end, and that was about it. But the punishment that my skates had taken on the ramps and in the sports hall had clearly been too much. So I bought a pair of skates that seemed pretty much unbreakable – the aggressive skates of the time – the Rollerblade Tarmacs. They did very well too, as I must have bought them when I was about 17 and I only got rid of them last summer. I had had other pairs of skates along the way, but I wrecked them all and returned to the trusty unbreakable Tarmacs every time. Two years into my Salomon sponsorship I decided to get rid of them as I had done most things imaginable to my FSKs without breaking them, so figured I was safe now.

Soon enough I was free of school and went to Essex for my year out. I’d been lucky enough to win a sponsorship with Ford for my mechanical engineering degree, so I got to spend the year, and successive summers, being paid to play with and test drive cars. Nice. But it didn’t really involve skating. I think there was at least one six month period where I never touched my skates. The first time I skated was two months in. I remember that because I had just got together with one of my housemates the night before (why would you do that? WHY??) and his first experience of me being his new girlfriend was seeing me dressed like a guy in my baggy skating trousers & a hoodie with baggy t-shirt sticking out the bottom saying goodbye as I headed out for a skate at Chelmsford icerink with Cressida who was visiting me for the weekend.

In the Summer I got sent to Swansea and would occasionally persuade the lads to accompany me over to Cardiff to visit the rink there.

Back to part 4

To part 6...

Naomi's website: http://www.skatefreestyle.com/

Summary of articles by/about Naomi on this website

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