RIELY PAVEY QUARANTINED

You may know Riley Pavey as one of the Australian Nike SB up-and-comers, the kid from a few Precinct ads and the winner of our New Gen of the Year award in 2019. Riley is a Gold Coast skate rat, a bit of a smart arse and a sugar fiend. For such a young dude, he manages to travel the East Coast quite a lot. Even while he was in high school, he’d frequent Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne all the time.

A few months back, Riley went down to Melbourne to film some tricks with Geoff Campbell and to stay with his girlfriend who lives down there. After a trip up to Sydney, and then another stint back in Melbourne, COVID-19 – and the hysteria surrounding it – ripped through Victoria. Riley found himself at his girlfriend’s place for the next four-and-a-half months. Eventually, he and his girl managed to escape the city amid stage four lockdowns, but not without paying the price of two weeks in hotel quarantine at their own expense. I had a yarn to Riley a few days after his escape where he talked through his time as an inmate in a Brisbane hotel room; the tricks he filmed in Melbourne and Sydney while he was down there; and the bliss of his newfound freedom back on the Gold Coast.

You just spent your first weekend out in the world after two weeks in hotel quarantine, how was it, and what did you get up to?

My weekend was pretty amazing. I just went and hung out with my friends. It was actually really weird. I didn’t know how to speak to anyone. I had anxiety because I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t been face-to-face with anyone for like a month. And then I went skating, just like any other day.

Just to backtrack a little bit,