THURSDAY THOUGHTS - 'ALL HAIL CARDIEL'

After yapping away to one of the young local rippers down the skatepark, the topic of chat turned into school. This young lad told me about an essay he had written about his favourite skateboarder, John Cardiel. I was already familiar with this guys amazing life story but thought a lot of you who read the blog wouldn’t be. So here it goes, the story of Cardiel through the eyes of a 15 year old Scottish shredder. He got a B for this by the way.

My essay is about a famous skateboarder, John Cardiel. He was born on the 9th of December 1973 in San Jose, California. He is an inspiration to most skaters all across the world and he is also one of my favourite skateboarders of all time.

After John Cardiel was born in San Jose he moved to LA for a little bit, then Sunnyvale, Campbell and also Utah. Finally he moved to Half Moon Bay and lived there for about 10 years then moved to Grass Valley, California. He has two sisters and one brother. He started skating when he was in the second grade when he was down at the corner shop across from his house. He saw some kids roll up on skateboards and he thought they were the craziest things he had ever seen, so he asked for a shot, then he had a go and managed to do a 180 ollie without even knowing it was a trick. The kids were pretty amazed that he managed to do a trick for the first time ever being on a skateboard. From then on he felt that skateboarding just came to him naturally. The only other sport he was into at the time was skim boarding and going out on his bike.

About a month or two later he started nagging his mum to buy him a skateboard but she kept on turning him down. But one day his mum told him to do the laundry and as he went down to grab the clothes he felt a hard wooden thing. It was a brand new Santa Cruz full set up so then he went out and skated it. He started skating in Half Moon Bay, California by skating down hills and learning to ollie and fakie ollie. Then a kid down the street gave him a box full of old skateboarder magazines and he was amazed at what people could do on skateboards. Once he started to see the skateparks and obstacles in the magazines then he started making mud hips and banks at the side of the hills so he could learn tricks on them. When he moved out to Grass Valley he started BMXing a lot because it was all mud. Once him and his friend starting skating again they moved onto bigger things like, schools, car parks and empty swimming pools. Then his first skateboard competition was in Boreal, which he didn’t even enter but just wanted to skate, which was around 1990 or 1991, which was where Dogtown sponsored him. Then once they started sending him free decks he also got sponsored by Venture trucks and Spitfire wheels.

His first pro board deal fell apart when the company Dogtown went bust, but then it got released on a different company called Black Label. He felt as if his dreams had come true at this point because he was now a professional skateboarder. When Black Label started to go bankrupt he met up with Julian Stranger (another professional skateboarder) and started talking about starting their own skateboard company. They worked hard to find people to help out with this and therefore one of the most famous skateboard companies was born, Anti-Hero.

Cardiel continued to impress everyone with his new approach and rawness to skateboarding and in 1992 he got awarded with Thrasher Skater of the Year. He also got a famous vans skateboard shoes phrase “off the wall” named after when he jumped off the wall at Burnside skatepark into the steep vert quarter.

In 2003, at the end of a four-week road trip from Brisbane to Melbourne in Australia to film the skateboard movie Tent City, John Cardiel was hit by a van and run over by its trailer, which injured his spinal cord. He ended up in hospital not knowing what had happened or why he was there, all he knew that he couldn’t feel his legs but he thought that might have been from a drug they gave him or something. He looked up and saw Matt Rodriguez, Julian Stranger and his dad at the end of the bed. Julian was squeezing his leg and asking him if he could feel it but John just couldn’t. The doctor’s told his family that he would never able to walk again but he thought differently. After five months in hospital for rehabilitation he started to feel a twitch in his toe and he was like, “It is on!”. So after a few months of physio therapy and being in a wheel chair he started to regain the use of his legs. He started to walk but it was still a struggle, and also he started to just cruise about on his board by doing simple things like manuals, tic tacs and pumping on mini ramps, but not doing any tricks like ollies or anything. He is still trying and believes that if he keeps on working his way up he might keep on getting more and more movement in his legs.
Since then he has been on the Anti-Hero and Girl Beauty and the Beast Tours and is slowly making a recovery. He will most likely never be able to skate like he did before, but he gets on with life by trying to learn new things like DJ’ing and getting into music. He still cruises about on his board and goes about on his bike. I have also heard a rumour that he has opened a bike and skateboard shop where he now lives in Sacromento, California but I am not too sure about this because I haven’t seen any proof. John Cardiel will always be an inspiration and idal to not just me but to a lot of skateboarders who wish to be as good as him one day. Even though he may not be able to skate anymore the legend of John Cardiel will always live on through many generations of skateboarders to come.

Text by Neil Kellas

Check out John's Epicly Later'd on VBS TV.