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Tabron Tops the List
BMX Vert Finals Recap
By Jared Souney
BMX vert contests are becoming a war zone. Just ask Brian Cunningham, who showed up looking for a chance to place well in his first Pro event, and ended up spending two nights in the hospital with a serious concussion, a few broken bones in his face, and some internal bleeding after a bad crash in Saturday’s practice. All that damage, even with full pad protection and a full-face helmet. This stuff is no joke, that’s for sure, but the contest must go on.
Saturday’s blazing heat and humidity carried over to Sunday, but it wasn’t enough to slow down 10 of the best BMX vert riders in the world. Both Matt Fairbairn and Zach Shaw made the trip over from the UK, but both rode a bit better in prelims, placing them in 10th and 9th place respectively. Despite Brian Cunningham’s crash the day before, Ben Snowden still wore his open-faced skate helmet in true fearless warrior fashion (or maybe out of insanity). Either way he flowed both ways around the ramp and managed to throw in some tailwhips and carving lookbacks. Throw in a flair and 540s and this guy will start moving up in the ranks. It was 8th place for Snowden. One guy who just added both those tricks to his runs is Jason Branham, and it was enough to nab him 7th place. The high flying Jay Eggleston grabbed 6th place, almost landing a no-handed fakie air.
The top five finishers battled it out until the very end of the competition. Mike Mancuso improved his runs greatly from the prelims by adding some back to back tricks to his huge flairs, and no-handed flairs. He also added a nice combo line of a flair straight into a 540, into another flair. Fourth place went to Koji Kraft, who also added a flair to his repertoire, and in the opposite direction even. Tom Haugen was holding on to first place right up till the end of the second runs after pulling off two clean runs of tailwhips, double tailwhips, and supermans. Unfortunately, the top two qualifiers were able to put together good second runs, bumping Tom down to third place cash. John Parker, who qualified in first threw down some big tricks including an alley-oop downside tailwhip, but a slide-out on a decade air attempt might have kept him out of first. Simon Tabron was able to pull out all the stops in his second run, and bumped himself from a second place qualifying spot into the first place bucks. Simon threw down big flairs and huge 540 variations, along with stylized lookbacks, and twisted invert variations. Oh, and don’t let me forget the 900. Simon has landed more of those than anyone on a bike.
Now that the season has begun there is no stopping all these guys, and I think this may have only given us a taste of all the madness and new tricks we’re going to see this year. Hold on tight.
