Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads! No streets. I think about it when an arrow from scooterwith a child in a red quilted vest sitting on top, passes under my legs.
We do not need highways or streets, because we are in Skate Hubin Crom street of L’Hospitalet, the best indoor skate park in our region. When the saga of ‘Return to the future’its owners were more or less the age of this mini Marty McFly who has used my legs as a tunnel. If then they were told that they would make such a site possible, they would bet that it would be much more likely that in the 21st century there would exist, at a reasonable price, the Mattel hoverboardthat pink flying skateboard.
olympic sport
It’s ten in the morning and this industrial warehouse turned into skate mecca he stretches out with ‘Living for the city’, by Stevie Wonder, at a good volume. A 10-year-old student wearing a Public Enemy T-shirt tries an ‘ollie’ while a chain of seven dwarfs on wheels (ages four to six) stands with knee pads, elbow pads and atomic ant helmets (one of them, with a ‘Paw Patrol’ sweatshirt, is charming, besides, of course, being my son).
gaston francis, one of the partners in this invention, learned to skate in a rather different way. He was about 12 years old and lived in a dead-end street in Buenos Aires, in an area crossed by a train track. «We come from a skateboarding culture different. They were the weird ones, they were very impressive, but they always welcomed you. Now everything has changed, until it will be olympic sport. But we want the important thing not to change », he says.
This is a indoor skate parkbut also a children’s academy. Contains a room exhibitions (hanging on the walls, tables from all periods and countries), another to watch videos related to the history of this sport or lifestyle and, above all, courses.
The monitors today, Bautista and Álvaro, are, in addition to being good teachers, the cousin or uncle that we all wanted to have as a child. They awaken in the little ones an obedience that does not rest on authority, but on complicity (It is easy to imagine how they would toast them with a fifth and a Trinaranjus, to then greet each other with some encrypted handshake). “Both have a lot experiencebecause we wanted the best. Also the track itself has been made by the best company. We got the idea from seeing how in another improvised place someone was giving classes on a track where there were people sleeping off or even broken bottles on the floor. This is the complete opposite”, says Gastón.
nights on skates
Besides this school on wheelsthey have done many other things, from hosting a NGO so that Unaccompanied Minors could have some fun until they recorded a 12-year-old Japanese boy who is blowing up the click meters of his social networks or celebrate birthday parties. Many others are also proposed, such as hosting team building of companies (perhaps they are already fed up with shooting colored paint at the boss, even if it is tempting) or celebrate nights for adultswith bar and music.
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Also extracurricular with schools: «There is no bullying here. The ‘skaters’ We don’t do parties, but sessions. We don’t go out to compete, but to share some time with friends. Creates community». And a boy with a ‘Paw Patrol’ sweatshirt hugs another from behind with a red padded vest, both on a ‘skateboarding‘ heading towards the ramp: where they’re going, to the future, they don’t need roads.