Red Bull Manny Mania 2009

This years final of Manny Mania was held at The Old Truman Brewery, this is the second year Red Bull have run this event alongside King Ramps. For those unfamiliar with how Manny Mania works, each trick or tricks must be linked with a manual for it to count. Things kicked off about 12pm with a jam session open to the public till about 1.30pm, this gave the public a chance to test their skills on the course before the heats kicked off.

For the heats the qualifiers were separated into 5 groups of 4, each group had a 10 minute jam session to impress the judges.

The groups consisted of:

Tim Prozorov, Dan Main, Joe Moore, Kris Vile
Keith Allan, Ben Rowles, Paddy MaGuire
Sean Smith, Ashton Launcherley, Josh Cox, Will Greenfield
Chris Gibbons, Dan Nicholas, Craig Smedley, Steve Sherwood
David Flood, Tom Shimmin, Brian Esmond, Chris Atherton

There was some high standard of skating going down in the heats, despite the fact it was freezing the majority of the skaters nailed some tech tricks to catch the judges eyes. First time I’ve witnessed Tim Prozorov skate and he does have some serious style to him as does Sean Smith although that’s what we would expect from an MK regular, he pulled out some tricks including a sick nose manual – nollie tre out.

After the heats finished there was another jam session to give the public another chance on the course and after the heats I bet they couldn’t wait. It also gave us a chance to get a hot drink and adjust our position to underneath one of the outdoor heaters. By time the finals kicked off again the cold had really kicked in and you had to feel for the skaters trying to stay warm enough to actually land anything.

The finalists were split into two groups consisting of:

Final 1: Kris Vile, Craig Smedley, Tom Shimmin, Paddy McGuire
Final 2: Sean Smith, Ben Rowles, Joe Moore, Tim Prozorov

Each group was given a chance to warm up for 10 minutes before the two final 15 minute jams kicked of. In the first final sadly some of the bigger names seemed to fold and everyone’s attention was focused firmly on the wild card Paddy McGuire from the Ireland qualifier, his style is slightly rough but he tore up the course with some of the more inventive trick combination’s of the day, there’s too much to list but I will mention that he landed a shuv late front foot flip out of a manual. It’s refreshing to see an unknown come and shut down some of the bigger names, gives hope to the rest of us!

When the second final kicked in you could see the cold had caught up to skaters as they started slowly, struggling to land any tricks of note. Eventually Ben and Joe took charge of this final with Ben throwing down some sick hardflip to manuals and Joe brought some tech to the table with a fakie big flip up the step up to manual pop out, you could see how much he wanted it.

When the time came to announce the winner and the runner ups were being announced, everyone had a pretty good idea who the winner was with Paddy being pushed towards the stage before his name was read out. He deserved to win it, he landed the most varied set of tricks on the day and the most amount of tricks overall, well done Paddy.

The final results respectively are:

Paddy (£2000), Ben (£1000), Joe (£500), Sean(Setup), Kris, Tom, Craig, Tim.

Red Bull put on a great event and King Ramps built a brilliant course, shame about the judges placement though as they did count a fair few horribly scraped manuals which were obstructed from their view, but we’ll let them off. The event would have been so much better indoors as the skater did suffer, although the event benefited from the public popping down to see what all the noise was. The Etnies shoe swap had a very good turn out and the majority of the crowd were rocking new shoes, props to them for doing it.

Roll on next year!

Photos by Josh Belcher.