Harrington takes final stop of Dew Tour [VIDEOS]
On Friday, October 19th the AST Dew Tour Wakeboard Rail Jam made its appearance on the backside parking lot of the Amway Arena (Home of the Magic) in Orlando, Florida. Squeezed in between FMX, BMX Dirt and Skateboard Vert were two very large portable pools making up a step down miniature rail park for ten professional wakeboarders to exploit their skills to a very curious crowd.
[Videos after the break]
At one end on the high side, atop a large amount of scaffolding, was a starting pool and deck for the riders set up for each hit. On the low side, at ground level, sat a Mastercraft X-Star mocked up as if it were pulling people across the water like it would on a normal lake. Attached to its tower was a gas powered wench driven by Ryan Davis. Ten of wakeboardings professional athletes took turns on a series of different hits to see who could walk away with the title.
The two pools were the main attraction for most of the event, however, to the side sat another option which consisted of a smaller narrow pool as a run way that led to a kicker ramp that launched riders up to the larger landing pool in a step up configuration. Most riders took the high road to show the crowd their skills on two banked flat bars to a down rail, a wall ride to down rail and an up rail to flat bar to long down rail that riders could try to gap over if they chose.
The event flew by with rider after rider continuously trying to lay down the most technical trick to advance to the next round. With rope boys running the rope back to the starting dock and riders getting ready in between I could hardly keep up with the action. Before you knew it, they were down to two semi-final battles between Shaun Murray against Collin Harrington and Brett Eisenhauer against Shawn Watson. Both Shaun and Shawn just couldn’t stand up their tricks to advance and Collin and Ike were off to the final round.
In the final round Collin threw down a series of technical grinds to easily take the win away from newly retired Eisenhauer as he finished his final competition of the year and supposedly his career. Collin once again showed that he is one of the top rail riders in the industry and went home with a $3000 cash prize and trophy to prove it. Check out the highlights and raw footage below.
Dew Tour Highlights
Dew Tour Raw Footage
Go to the AST Dew Tour website [externallink]
October 26th, 2007
8:59 am
A little background on DailyWake at the event. Usually we try to send out a team of guys to cover these events (like we did with Surf Expo), but only Kyle was able to head out to the Rail Jam that night. So, Kyle had to take on all of the duties. He shot with my HVX200 (which he isn’t very familiar with), which is a task in itself. The camera uses memory cards, and when shooting 60P HD footage, they fill up fast! With the competition flying by, there was literally no time to dump the cards to a laptop and keep shooting. We got most of the shots we were after, and I think the coverage turned out really good for just a one man operation over there.
Oh yeah, and Kyle forgot his tripod attachment (but brought the tripod) so he had to hold that heavy camera up the whole competition. That sucks
October 26th, 2007
8:40 pm
That’s some great footage, sorry it was so painful to get Kyle!
I’m looking forward to seeing DailyWake cover future events, you guys definitely have the most timely coverage out there.