A no show by Bestwick opens the door for Mirra to take the gold once again as he dominates the qualifiers in Philadelphia.

ESPN tries to do a good job keeping the crowd entertained during the competitions.  But, the most notable thing about vert qualifiers was the fact that when there are twenty riders, who each get 2 one and one-half minute runs, if you do the math, it works out to one hour of riding.  So when it takes THREE HOURS to run the preliminaries it means that for each 1 minute of riding, there was 2 minutes of non-riding.  Or in simple terms - two thirds of the qualifying rounds were spent with people bored as hell.  I had it easy - I just had to stand on my feet for three hours straight running the camera.  Lame.

But once we got beyond the lulls, the best vert riders in the world were going head-to-head on what was described by most as a somewhat 'erratic' ramp.  That is, according to Dennis McCoy, the ramp had some areas where the coping kicked you out further than other areas and there were some spots on the ramp that seemed to be a little under vert.  The riders all managed to get used to the ramp though because they didn't have much choice and made the most of it.

The biggest absence from the event was Jamie Bestwick who has been dominating the contest series throughout the year.  At any event he was always a favorite to get the win, and Dave Mirra was always being pushed harder by Jamie to do bigger tricks.  Without Jamie showing up at the event, it really opened the door for Mirra to ride away with the number one spot if he could hold it together.

Mirra is known for holding it together.  Dave was the last rider in qualifiers and the guy sitting in the number ten spot when Dave dropped in new he was in trouble.  That rider happened to be Koji Kraft.  Koji's first run left a little to be desired as he came down a little bit off from a tailwhip and had to slow things down.  He ended up taking a couple of short breaks during his run to regroup.  This left him at #10.

Dave Mirra is not someone you want to have coming up when you are in the number ten spot and he hasn't gone.  Dave rode, Dave blew peoples minds... Koji was dropped to number 11.

Koji still had one run left to push himself up enough to make the cut and he made the most of it.  He pulled a solid tailwhip over six feet out and threw down double barspins, barspin to barspin back, barspin to no-hander, and really nice decade airs.  His average for two runs put him slightly ahead of Stephan Geisler who finished in the number 11 spot.

There was little else in the way of surprises during the qualifiers.  The guys that you would expect to make the cut did.  Kevin Robinson, Mat Hoffman, Simon Tabron, Jay Miron, Dennis McCoy, Jason Davies, Jay Eggleston, Eduardo Terreros, and of course, Dave Mirra.

The biggest single trick of the qualifiers went to Jay who pulled a 540 tailwhip perfectly.  After watching Jay's run there had to be some people wondering if Dave had what it would take to go into the top spot.  Dave didn't do it with one trick, but with every trick.  Dave dropped into the ramp and didn't stop until his time was up.  Most notably was his corkscrew (carving flair) from right to left across the entire ramp, into a recovery air, straight back into a huge corkscrew from LEFT TO RIGHT across the ramp.  It's nice to see he has that trick wired going either direction.  Nice.

Matt Hoffman pulled a perfect flair in the middle of his first run and came up a little short in his second run.  He finished his second run by trying a 900 after the buzzer had sounded and crashing hard.  He got up and walked away, but it is a definite preview of what he will be trying tomorrow during the finals.

~P~

PHOTOS
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QUALIFIERS