New Sport House - Stockholm

(Referencing photo in gallery) So I’ve been meaning to talk about the Swedish skatepark where I grew up skating, but it’s such a big and long story, with so aspects to it, that I’ve just been procrastinating. But I just ended up with a good enough reason to start, just focusing on a particular area.

A quick run down on the legendary skatepark in Sweden called New Sport House. It was a bold maneuver by a couple of guys that had started to import Skateboards in Sweden in 1976, along with a few other American new fangled ideas, like Hang-gliders and Roller skates, hence the name “New Sport”. In 77 or 78, they opened the skatepark, that also had a pro shop, a deli, an arcade, a full DJ booth that blasted music, a spectator balcony and the whole place was housed in an old movie theatre in a really cool part of Stockholm.

The built several things to skate in there, a narrow full pipe, an even more narrow and weird halfpipe, some banks and quarters and this really weird concrete bowl on a wooden frame. Not really that great of an idea, since wood moves and concrete cracks when set on top of moving wood.

At different times, we modified the “no flat bottom” bowl. It had started out with a wooden extension of about 7 ft of vert, that got cut down to a more modest 2-3 feet and then we built another few feet of a wooden extension of the other side of the roll-in, making a channel of sorts. This is a me going frontside over it in 1980 or so, I think after I came back from California the first time.

The reason I thought I’d post this was that I had the weirdest déjà vu the other night while skating at the CA-TF. I was trying to learn frontside airs from the large wooden extension, clear a channel like gap and land on the other wooden extension. As soon as I made it, I felt like I had that feeling before and when I looked at the video, I totally knew why. It was really rather similar to the channel air that I had done at New Sport House 39 years earlier at the innocent young age of 16! See the video from last Thursday Old School Skate sesh and check it out. I also told Chris Dang @chrisclicksdigital that we have to go there and shoot it proper too.

-Tony Magnusson 2019