Oh dear oh dear. Tricks are getting crazy. From Dew action website again.
"The day before Vert Open Qualifiers in Louisville, rumors were flying that Keith McElhinney had frontflip flairs on lock, which was simply too impossible to believe. Unfortunately, he got stuck trying a regular flair during his runs and failed to qualify.
Denver was a different story, however. Keith went for it in his second run in Prelims, ejecting at the last second to avoid a disastrous hang-up. His fellow riders on the deck weren’t going to let him go out like that, though, and with the help of deafening applause from the crowd, Keith dropped back in and twisted the first frontflip flair ever pulled on a real vert ramp. The place went nuts, and Keith achieved a goal that’s been nagging him for two years. Here’s what he had to say about it.
Q: How long have you been working on this trick?
A: I started about two years ago. A 17-year-old camper at Woodward was working on frontflips on the box-jump foam pit – he’s basically the guy who revolutionized frontflips. I figured I’d try one, and my first attempt was perfect. Of course, I didn’t pull another one for twenty or thirty tries, but I had the basic idea of how to do it, so I figured I’d just try it on vert. I started trying a bunch of different rotations, but nothing worked. About a year ago, we were having a really good session, and Anthony Napolitan was there. He had just started working on frontflip turndowns, so I told him I was going to do one on vert. I pulled a certain way for it and it worked so much better. I tried five or six more, and they really started working out. I moved to the resi and knee-slid out on my first one, so I was confident that I knew how to get out of it. I landed the second one.
They were doing best trick at the Dew Tour finals last year; I wanted to do it then, but I wasn’t pre-qualified so I couldn’t enter. At that point, I was doing like twenty a day on resi. Two months before the tour this year I figured I couldn’t wait any longer, so I decided to do one on the real vert ramp. I knee-slid out of the first one, so I felt pretty confident. On the next one, I over-rotated a little bit, my front wheel folded, and I smashed my head into the ground.
I went into Louisville with the intention of throwing one in Prelims, but I ended up falling on a regular flair and didn’t make it into Prelims. That was probably a good thing, because I really started to think about what I might be doing wrong. I got back to Woodward and tried a new idea and it was just butter. I did one or two a day, and they were perfect. I got here today and my stomach was in knots. I couldn’t see the coping; my runs were horrible. I tried it in my second run, but I was going to hang up on my head tube, so I threw the bike away. When you fall once on a real ramp and you don’t get wasted, you just think, “Game on!” So I went for it after my run was over and pulled it.
Q: How does it feel to finally pull one in front of all these people?
A: It mattered most that Gary Ream, the owner of Woodward, was in the audience. He’s the one who makes all these tricks possible, because he developed the vert foam and vert resi. Doing it in front of him, and in front of all my friends who dug me out of the foam for a year, that was the biggest thing. They’ve supported me so much; you don’t learn tricks in a vacuum, you learn because you ride with people who influence you, help you, psych you up to do stuff. The Woodward crew is the best crew on the planet.
Q: Okay, so you’ve pulled this one. What’s next?
A: I’ve done some variation frontflairs on the resi before, so I’m sure those will come up next. My biggest thing is that I just want to keep riding. I don’t care if it’s at a competitive level or tooling around with my son. It’s more important for me to be on my bike than to do specific tricks. This one just felt right, and it worked out for me. The worst thing that might come out of this is that people will say, “Hey! Do a frontflair!” everywhere I go. I like my life, I love my family, and that’s more important than a trick is ever going to be. "
