The largest demo I / We have ever done.
Japan 2000, Black Label Skateboards Tour.
It was myself, Jason Adams, John Lucero, Jim Gagne, Omar Hassan and Salman Agah.
Our Japanese tour managers spoke broken English.
We just went and did what they told us.
On this day we were told “We go to demo now”.
Okay, standard procedure, get in the van and head out.
Except this time we don’t pull up to a skatepark, we pull up to a stadium.
We all start asking, “Hey! Where are we going?”
The only response we keep getting is “We go to demo.”
Then we drive past security and into the underground of the stadium.
All the while we all keep asking repeatedly, “Where are we going?”
Always met with the same response of, “We go to demo.”
We get out of the van and start following the tour manager down a long hallway in the stadium.
And just like out of a movie, we can see and hear what we are walking towards at the end of that hallway.
We walk out onto a stage that has a street course set up.
And there are around 100,000 roaring Japanese people.
Next to us was another stage with bands playing.
I guess it was some sort of punk rock music festival and they thought it would be a good idea to have us skating all day on the other stage? It was the early 2000’s so lots of weird stuff like this was going on.
Anyways, we all just laughed at the absurdity of it all, embraced it and had a blast.
We skated hard, threw waters out to the kids sweating it out in the crowd and laughed at each other when we saw ourselves on the jumbo tron.
Nothing like taking a slam on a jumbo tron in front of a packed stadium.
I took this photo of Jason and Salman just so I had some sort of proof that this really happened.
~Kristian Svitak
