NSW THE MIGHTY BLUES TAKE THE WIN
“It was amazing and horrible,” said Dane Burman of the week that was Skate of Origin, 2019. Specifically, he was talking about the book of challenges that we’d put together, many of which were stabs in the dark about what was possible and what wasn’t. He explained, “It’s fun for new ideas for things you’d normally not think you could do, but when you’re a few hours deep on a trick that isn’t all that fun, then it gets horribly torturous.” But even if Dane thought parts of it were “horribly torturous”, he and the boys from NSW were playing to win. And when it came to putting together a team of five solid skateboarders to represent The Blues, NSW looked strong from the get-go. Between Dane, Jake Hayes and Jack O’Grady, they had three SOTYs from the Shire. Then there was Rob Pace, a young and hungry Central Coast rail chomper, and Noah Nayef, a 17-year-old prodigy from Western Sydney. Throw in filmer, driver and team captain, George Kousoulis, and the team’s first-choice photographer, Sam Coady, and NSW was ready for war.
Even as they were jammed into a tiny eight-seater van and instructed to make the trek from Sydney to Canberra with their luggage on their laps, it was evident that the NSW team would be a force to reckoned with. They seemed to have a good mix of experience, skill, hunger and sobriety. And in the end, they had just enough to take home the $10,000 prize money. But it wasn’t without considerable effort, tactics, and man-hours in the streets.
RULES OF THE GAME
As far as the rules went, the game of Skate of Origin was pretty
