Day 2 here in beautiful Chiba, Japan and my first full day at the X Games. The first nights sleeping is always so hard, and after waking p at 2am, I managed to fall sleep until 7am.
First things and breakfast was a fun catch up with the X Games organisers, and then caught up with riders, Broc Raiford, Terry Adams, Matthias Dandois, Varo Hernandez and many more.
After a breakfast it was time for the daily covid test, and then over to the venue, which I got a great view from breakfast.( Check the photo.)
As promised, it is time for Episode 80 of the Flatmattersonline Exclusives! Today we have a belter from Mickey Gaidos out of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Mickey throws down an amazing teakettle jump to spinning hitch line that just keeps building, and ends in a s super dope spinning Circle k to half bar flip Karl out! Filmed at his home riding spot by Terry Adams, I love Mickey’s energy in this when he hollers “Flatmatters”.
Thank you Mickey for contributing and Terry for filming, super dope!!
The clips keep building, and another clip is ready for episode 81 on Sunday… After that I am dry on clips, so if you are at home and wish to feature on the site. Drop me a message and let’s fire these exclusives out to the magic 100!
**Mickey however ignored two rules of the exclusives, there is music from New Order (I’m not making any money out of this YouTube I promise) and the video is filmed Portrait not landscape. Rules are made to be broken I guess, and it’s freestyle!
It’s time to announce the winners of the 2021 Flatmattersonline Year End Awards, as well as show some love to the nominees….
It’s a labour of love putting this together, after two weeks filming, capturing, and editing, the show is finally is done!
If you are unfamiliar with the awards, there are 5 categories in both editorial and reader choice. I made a few changes this year, adding Female Rider of the Year + Brand of the Year to the awards.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote, and congratulations to all the winners and nominees, tune into the Year end awards show to find out who won in each category!
There is a real buzz in the flatland community about the Ultimate Flatland League starting this year, and with uncertain times very much here with what will happen in the future with the Covid 19 pandemic. You can well understand why, Martti Kuoppa has been working hard on a demo video to showcase in more detail how the event will work.
Over to the Boss:
I have received a great amount of super good feedback about the Ultimate Flatland League online video competition. Many thanks again everyone!
I decided to put together a demo video of all rounds to demonstrate the UFL format more clearly:
Round 1: Ground Tactics non-edited full run (Toon demonstrates it in this video)
Round 2: Master Of Creativity best trick / best combo round (Sietse Van Berkel´s one trick from 2020 MOC)
Round 3: MK Format Live battle. This is captured from a real Zoom battle. (Terry Adams and Toon). The final battle of UFL will be screen recorded and the finalists are asked to use another camera (HD quality) to film the run they perform during the live battle. That is for 2 good reasons: The make sure that if the internet connection is lost there is still the proof for the run and for the post production I need to have much better quality video than what today´s live video calls are offering. The instructions will be a lot more detailed than this but will send them to the ones who are going to ride in the finals. Also, more detailed info will be sent to everyone who are participating the Round 1.
Big thanks to all sponsors of the first Ultimate Flatland League:
www.mkformat.com
www.kunstform.org/en/
www.flatlandfuel.com
This competition will be judged by:
Effraim Catlow
Sebastian Grubinger
York Uno
It looks like I will be limiting the registrations to 30 riders per category so if you have not signed up yet, now it is time to do so:
It’s time to announce the winners of the 2020 Flatmattersonline Year End Awards, 2020 was a difficult year for everyone. Flatland as a community rallied together to make the best of these difficult, testing times.
We saw riders focus more on edits rather than contest placings, as a result perhaps the rate of progression was a lot greater than previously would be, those that wanted to compete took part in numerous online contests, and in between all that the FM exclusives made to 60 episodes in 2020.
What the future holds is unclear currently, the vaccines are getting out there, and we hope to know more by spring time which really isn’t that far away.
Let’s try, and remain positive and make the best of every situation.
It’s time as promised to announce the 2020 Flatmattersonline Year end awards nominations,
I felt there was a lot to say about the awards and the year, which a lot of the time doesn’t get covered under the previous text announcement format.
So, I attempted to make a makeshift studio feel in my front room during lockdown 3.0, and present the nominations, and share my feelings on the year as well as the reader choices.
Congratulations to everyone who was nominated, and thank you to everyone who took the time to vote.
Winners announced: Sunday 24th January.
* If you don’t want to watch the whole show, you can skip through parts using the timestamps.
TIME STAMPS:
00:00 FM Title Screen
00:07 Effraim introduces the FM Year end award nominee show
00:56 Reader Choice Rider of the Year
04:59 Reader Choice Edit of the Year
8:07 Reader Choice Most Progressive Rider
11:38 Reader Choice Contest Run of the Year
15:12 Reader Choice Breakthrough Rider of the Year
19:33 Effraim introduces the Editorial Awards
20:50 Editorial Choice Rider of the Year
27:33 Editorial Choice Edit of the Year
31:06 Editorial Choice Most Progressive Rider
35:55 Editorial Choice Outstanding Contribution
39:37 Editorial Choice Line of the Year / Flatmattersonline Exclusive of the Year
46:06 Effraim Outro
You must be living under a rock if you are not seeing the eFise fan vote videos all over social media, well… I just got done helping out with the judges vote and the results have been combined to determine the top 8 for the eFise finals!
Congratulations to Jean William Prevost who took the top spot with an epic entry, Dub was followed by Yu Katagiri and Terry Adams. Check the top 3 videos out below and I’ll post the others shortly, as well below this post. Finals coming up soon, it’s going to be insane with the riders filming another 2 minute run!
It’s a good start to the week here on Flatmattersonline, TJ Perry came through with a couple of amazing full videos for us to get motivated.
I rinsed this Ares DVD Magazine back when this came out in 2008,loved the no-fuss mix tape type of feel this DVD has featuring York Uno, Hiroya Morizaki (everything Hiroya does!), Yoshihiro Shinde, Yoshiki “Hotoke” Uchino (his line at 19:19 is still unreal to this day!), Terry Adams (that Voodoo line at 11:55!), Hironao Doko, Calvin Tan, Fumiaki Okayama.
This is well worth your time today, you won’t regret it!
Nice edit from the Toronto contest this year before the Covid-19 pandemic hit us all featuring Jean William Prevost, Terry Adams, Joey Kylio, Issi Orbe, Juan Niebles ansJean-Francois Boulianne.
The finals day at the UCI World Championships was a great day for flatland. The day started with Women’s flat and four riders knuckled down and give it their all, Irina Sadovnik was battling a knee injury and with the help of Trish and her medical skills she was able to ride. Sometimes when you are faced with a physical obstacle such as an injury your focus is heightened. The injuries were stacking up in China and kind of became one of the main topics of everyones discussions during the two week trip.
Lionel Cardoso on the MIC duties, and David on the decks. props to these guys who killed it throughout the series and the two weeks in China!
