Words by Danny Blanco / Photos by Stephen Jones

the busride from dubai to abu dhabi was jammin

Wild in the Streets 09’ (UAE edition) started out like any other day, running from the house to the car transfixed on nothing else but tuning the AC to high. Abu Dhabi is about 68 nautical miles (127 kilometres) from Dubai and boasts an ever-evolving landscape and skate populous that we felt couldn’t be ignored for this year’s Wild In The Streets 2009.

luke kelly blasts a huge ollie from the second step at the Abu Dhabi public skatepark

Evan Collisson and I threw on some fat roots reggae dub and proceeded to fly down the Dubai-Abu Dhabi road maintaining illegal speeds in our bosses mum’s maroon mini cooper. We were making record time until the pedal eased off and we realised we were rolling with no juice in the tank for the past, like 40 km’s.

mark gavigan ollies the big four

canons, such an ill spot, such crap ground!

When we finally arrived, No joke, it was literally between 48-50 degrees Celsius outside and regardless of that; there were more kids shredding at the park then there was Fahrenheit in the thermometer. Diehards from the 7 emirates all out in full force for the greater good that is Wild In The Streets.

ryan chambers, frontside flip at canons

asem, going for a 540 flip

 A local broadcaster came out and filmed proceedings for the nightly news; we couldn’t understand where half the skaters sprawled off to after murking the local park for up to 2 hours, we only realised later though that the promo girls from Red Bull had rocked up, they gave out crazy cans of the stuff, It went down gnarly with sun stroke, 200+ burgers and 1000 Litres of water we had but was cordially appreciated.

After lunch it didn’t get any cooler, dudes were literally throwing themselves into this kiddie play-park water fountain thing that was adjacent to the skate park, It didn’t help that our own Kader Hadri was captaining the swim team and appeared more keen on recruiting swimmers rather than pulling them out.

asem showed up out of nowhere and was killing it all day

canon's was littered with skaters

lawrence, nosebonk at chambers

We finished the day by hitting up another 2 spots that were conveniently wrapped around the protracted Abu Dhabi cornice and awarded one of our 3 Emerica best trick prizes to Syrian ripper Asem Al-Hamad who pulled off a tre-flip sex change off a big 4 set, another one of the prizes went out to this sick Philipino dude named Sid that muscled a smooth k-grind tail grab off the same set for the win.  Other standouts included Dhia Khelifa from Dubai and ‘Rage Rippers’ Ryan Chambers and Jan Hoffman who were chomping up stair sets at every spot.

sid, tailgrab krooks

With hours killed, fun had and no casualties reported in the sweltering equatorial heat we started packing up because there were no lights at the spot we rolled up at last, by that time the day’s heat turned to a cruel 80% humidity at sun fall.

On the ride back home, Evan and I were determined to make that record time to Dubai that was robbed from us on the way up to Abu Dhabi but were callously cut short cause some kid forgot his deck at the park. We did what we had to do and got back on the road; talking over one other whilst giving our own takes on the afternoons festivities.

After summing up the days play we were already discussing next year’s event, agreeing about everything but the choice of music that was reverberating out the speakers.

Next year’s going to be sick.

VIDEO COMING SOON!