Photos: Axel ‘Pedro’ Hildebrand

The Santa Cruz Rookie Rider Clash has been bringing fun, games, and damn fine riding to the spiritual home of indoor riding – Tamworth – for the last four years. This year’s event, which took place over the weekend, was arguably the finest so far. Cherry Martin was there to witness all the action, and send us this report.

Over 200 prizes from sponsors Santa Cruz, Vans, Skullcandy, Osisris, Circa, SCUK and Vestal all supplied prizes galore to be won all night long in the jam from hoodies to wallets and backpacks were thrown out for tricks, stacks and sheer balls of bravery.

Jo Howard MC’ed the night away, geeing up the 70-strong crowd of devoted Santa Cruz followers – the Screaming Hand stickers adorned helmets and boards alike. The Santa Cruz C-rail was where riders proved their steeze and everyone
took on the torpedo. Front flips were thrown off the Skullcandy kicker with people going increasingly bigger over the course of the evening for a chance to win one of 20 sets of headphones.

Winning the event for the guys was Alex Wayne and for the gals, Becky Menday. Santa Cruz introduced a groms category this season as well to showcase up and coming youth riders. Tomski Robinson won the young-guns title and wowed the crowd. All of the winners showed consistently good style and riding across all of the slope all of the night and absolutely killed it in the finals – they each walked away with Santa Cruz clothes, Vans boots of their choice, Skullcandy headphones a subscription to Snowboard Club UK and kickass Vestal watches.

A massive thank you to all of the Santa Cruz Clash sponsors and to Tamworth SnowDome for letting us run a (white) riot!

The Clash will be back next year…