As announced, we made our way to Mannheim, over 466m/750km away,
on Tuesday, in order to jump the prequalification of the "Night
of the Jumps".
Of the four ramps that we had at our disposal, two stood at
66ft/20m (26ft/8m radius), a 30ft/9m radius ramp at 72ft/22m
and the kicker with the funbox in front of it stood st 36ft/11m
or so. The start-up and breaked run were typically not exactly
overly proportionally designed, but didn't prove a problem.At
the end of the training I was pretty optimistic, since my tricks
worked out pretty well and was able to deal with the track well.
Fabien Fenouil (FRA), Alastair Sayer (BOT) and Martin Schenk,
who hurt himself during the training, were also there for the
training.
I was up first and showed everything that my current training
condition (jumped 3 times since October) had to show for it.
I was pretty happy with my run, but I still had to admit defeat
to Fabien and Alastair. I felt that this wasn't a tragedy, since
they kicked some serious ass. (Fuckin' judges.)
Anyway, that ended my day, well not quiet, because I was invited
to be on the judging panel for the first time, which promised
to be a lot of fun.
Seeing the whole thing from a different perspective has its
perks. However, I definitely don't want to get used to it, because
it's really difficult to evaluate every rider fairly based on
their performance.
After an evening of awesome freestyle actionwe went around Mannheim
with a few people and let the evening end on a high note.
The next prequalification is on 03/11/06 in Nürnberg, which
will also mark my next attempt.
Florian
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