OKLAHOMA SHOWDOWN | EVENT REPORT

REPORT BY: EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: KEVIN LITTLE, @kevinmlittle.

PHOTOS BY: JOHN SULLIVAN @sullyphotozjohnsullivan, KEVIN LITTLE, @kevinmlittle

The Oklahoma Showdown is now in its third consecutive year & the event keeps getting bigger & better. The Showdown was started by Zach Smith & the Blade OK group in 2021 & he had a dream of creating a legitimate contest series to give skaters from the midwest U.S. an event to call their own. Each & every year Zach is heavily involved in raising all the funding needed to provide prizes to the winners of the contests as well as donating brand-new inline skates to prospective kids who want to get involved in skating. In total for the last three years Zach has donated over a hundred brand new pairs of junior Razors & Kaltik skates to kids! That is a massive accomplishment!

Dave Bloom & his son with their donated Razors Junior Skates | Photo: Kevin Little

The Oklahoma Showdown was a full day event featuring junior, female, amateur, and professional contests. I was invited again this year to be a judge for the contest and the competitors sure didn’t make my job easy. This year’s event drew out a slew of new faces including the French Brothers, Arsenio Patterson, Andrew Broom, and Jose Arce as well as some returning heavy-hitters like Eric Michael, Aarin Gates, & Eric Hallimen.

The juniors men and women’s events featured some up-and-coming talent that showed a ton of heart and promise that will hopefully keep them driven for many years to come. The winner of the junior’s women’s event, a young skater named Helena fell incredibly hard at the very beginning of her run but after some encouragement from her family and the crowd she was able to rally back for a remarkable winning performance. The Bladies Pro contest was a fierce battle between Aarin Gates and a formidable new Bladie named Marisa Joanna. Aarin once again took home the crown with her extensive trick vocabulary and consistency, but the young Marisa showed her heart and natural athletic abilities that proved she has a ton of potential and is a skater who will be making big strides in blading in the future.

Marisa Joanna- Soul grind | Photo: John Sullivan

The Amateur division featured some incredible talent that battled it out in hopes to advance to the stacked Pro division. After flying through the course, linking numerous tricks in lines & incorporating some wild head spinning breakdancing moves into his routine, Jon “NewJack” Perez went home with a win in the Amateur comp & advanced to compete with the the big boys.

The Pro division showed the skaters turning the amplitude up a notch with a slew of technical grinds going down on the big bank to PVC grind box and the perfect downhill connection rails. Skaters whose performances stood out were Eric Hallimen with a nice mix of high-flying misty flips & quick footed switch-ups , Arsenio Patterson with a very consistent bevy of tricks which he rattled off one after the other. And then you have wizards like Logan Harlan who pulled out some of his signature negative tricks which effortlessly laced both ways and we can’t forget to mention the smooth stylings of the Nate “The Ninja” Nyman, who finessed the long ledges with a wide range of unique tricks .

Eric Michael took the competition’s best trick honors with a MASSIVE disaster topsoul from a far bank to the long PVC grind box. He tried to one-up his trick with a last minute switchup, but after almost impaling himself on a fat box rail, he decided to not tempt fate and settled for the landed topsoul, which was still the consensus trick of the day. Razors pro rider Andrew Broom took first place with an absolute slaying of the entire course and a level of consistency that was unmatched. His final trick concluded the event perfectly with a burly launch from a distant quarter pipe to a topsoul on a drop-off quarter pipe and gapping into a super sketchy embankment which shot him literally out of the park and into a drainage canal running beside the park. How Andrew survived the trick is beyond my comprehension but it is further proof that when Andrew turns on “the juice”, he is one of the best skaters currently skating today. Peep some of the action from the event with a short highlight video from Quintrell Vines and some amazing photos provided by John Sullivan.