Bruce Crisman was one of the most talented riders to ride a freecoaster. He sparked off a world wide trend and Federal/KHE couldn’t get enough freecoasters out the door at the time. I remember loads of my friends being inspired by Crisman’s edits and interviews. At the time he was killing it, doing huge fakie stair drops, sometimes just plain old burly and other times doing turndowns and half cabs down sets you wouldn’t look at going forwards.

This photo was taken down near Meanwhile 2 skatepark in Royal Oak, London. It was a rancid set of stairs, stinking of urine and crap and even had the obligatory street needle from what I remember. The run up was decent but the run out was about a meter of flat before it went uphill. The angles for the photo were limited too, I could have done it fisheye but I don’t think it would have shown everything off properly, there was no real alternative other than to sit at the top of the bank and shoot long, the sun was slowly setting and we had to wait for it to stop flaring into the lens as it was making it impossible to see when Bruce was coming. I remember him having two or three attempts at doing it, the first couple of times getting blown off his bike when he landed and almost catching some sort of disease from the damp pee based liquid at the bottom of the stairs. It was horrible but this made him focus for his next attempt and then boom he landed it sweet with a quickly executed snap out too. I hope you like the photo, you can check out one of my favorite web edits of Bruce below filmed and edited by Edd Allen.

G33K: iso 400 | 70mm | f6.3 | 1/50th

Federal BMX – Bruce Crisman ‘Remixed’ Section