Sunday, June 28, 2009

Anyone seen the point?

You can clearly see that the guys who run the Dew Tour obviously realised that street was pretty popular. As people who are constantly after increased ratings and more exposure for sponsors and logos and all that jazz, so they appeared to think that trying to appeal to street riders would be beneficial. No doubt they also noticed that street web-edits were pretty popular and received a hell of a lot of views - especially if they contain the 'big names' - so, what better way to attract street riders than have the biggest names ride street, and make a street web-edit? Well, that kinda makes sense (Apart from missing the non-competitive point of street riding, and the no pressure, do-what-you-want point of it too), but when that 'street' is actually a pretty linear park format, and the riding is limited to just doing back and forth runs on that particular setup, it's not really the same thing. At all. Although the riding's pretty insane in these videos, there's no real connection to street whatsoever. Must be pretty stressful for the filmers too, having to try and make uniformly painted ramps with sponsors logos all over the place actually look good, and try and get different angles in. No fun at all. Ah well, I'm sure they'll get some £££'s from it, but it does seem to be a return of the 'big' competitions just trying to milk BMX for all it's worth. After some of the people running those biggers comps had turned it around and actually seemed to be more concerned with the way that they interacted with and represented BMX, it's pretty disappointing to see organisers doing stuff like this...

Anyway, the videos are pretty cool I guess (Although nowhere near as cool as it would be with the different backgrounds and cool environment that street brings with it, as well as unique setups that allow riders to be more creative (The point!)), it still seems like they could've done so much more, and so much better.





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