How To Turn Dropouts Into Weapons With Tate Roskelley.

Ever since my first trip to Salt Lake City in Early 2012, Tate has been talking about doing this crazy dropout grind at the University. Finally in 2013 on a nice warm summer evening he decided it was time to sharpen his dropouts and take this idea to the bank. Right at the end of the golden hour Tate assembled his old Drifter frame, loosened his nuts, and made history with what is definitely the first ever BMX trick to involve losing your back wheel in the process. Luckily for us, our official SLC resident blog-ographer Margie Richlen was there to capture this incredible moment in BMX history. Click the GIF to to BIG and click below for a little back story and some more images….

Like I said, Tate didn’t want to fuck up the 2.0, so he decided to assemble the ol’ fasioned 1.0 Drifter. This is also one of the few instances where a skateboard has been used to aid in or complete a BMX trick. Other examples would be Nate Wessel (or Taj….one of those guys) and Matt Beringer. There might be more I just can’t think of any right now…however all of those instances involved a rubber back tire and brakes, Tate’s only only involved some pointy metal ends and a dream…


Practice makes perfect. The fact that his front tire had to either clear over, or go next to the skateboard is crazy because that means his options are either hop the gap with his half-bike or come out of the grind slightly sideways. You can tell by the photos that Tate chose the latter, and had to get his lean on over to the right in order to ride away in a straight line.


I was told that when Tate was trying this, there were a couple times where his back wheel just kept going down the hill. Rather than having a wheel spotter at the bottom, Margie, Elf, Jordan and all of Tate’s friends instead just took photos and watched the wheel go by. What are true friends for?


Sweet Success.


A happy Elf. The clip of this will surely be featured in Elf and Jordan’s next SLC video project, so lookout for that in the future. For now, you can enjoy the above GIF over, and over, and over again courtesy of Alex Rabn the GIF making gold loving pimp.

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