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Australia's first international-standard skate and BMX park is being built in Logan, but kids and some skaters may initially struggle with the 3.6 metre quarter pipes, designed for big air time.
Key points:
- The $3.1 million skate park has been designed by reigning X Games champion Logan Martin
- The park will be able to host national competitions
- Some skaters say the park favours BMX riders rather than skateboarders
Logan City Council is spending $3.1 million this year on upgrading Beenleigh's Doug Larsen Park, so it can host national events.
Its design has been based off the FISE World Series arena ahead of the sports debuted at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.
Professional free-style BMX rider and reigning X Games champion Logan Martin helped design the park.
"They just have bigger sized ramps, bigger box jumps, bigger quarter pipes, a bigger spine and more transfers, so we sort of tried to base it off that," he said.
"[In BMX] there is a lot of spinning and a lot of flipping involved, kicking the bike around, in every direction really.
"The more airtime you get, the more time you have to do all these combinations."
The Logan-born rider was asked to look over the draft plan last year and he made some changes to the positioning and height of some structures, bringing the park up to a professional standard.
"All the new skate parks these days they just cater for the kids … they just build littler things and it doesn't really cater for professional BMX riders," he said.
"[A good park] needs to have multiple things … decent size quarter pipes, about seven to eight foot [2.13m to 2.43m] to do proper tricks on and then ten to twelve-foot quarter pipes to get up speed.
"I believe in making something bigger as kids can adapt to it, but I can't get more airtime on something small."
Design favours riders over skaters
Not everyone is impressed however, with some skaters saying it might be too big for them to practise technical tricks.
For skaters' size is not the only factor, they need variety to prepare for the unknown, as the layout of the Tokyo skate park will not be revealed until four months out from the event.
"The disciplines we have a completely different to that, I mean it's not to say it's not going to fun, but they [BMX] have their own Olympic stuff and their own particular courses," said Donny Fraser from the Australian Skateboarding Federation
"We will probably be able to use it and have fun on it, but it is not really focused on what we are looking at for the Olympics and what they're going to do with skateboarding."
Mr Fraser said serious skaters will be hitting all the parks around town to train.
"It's beneficial for people to be able to skate everything, so when you have ten different parks in the area to be able to use them all well is an advantage," he said.
In a statement the Logan Council said the rebuild would include an international-standard steel ramp with a sound-dampening layer and a concrete riding surface coated with a waterproof epoxy sealant that covers slab joints and makes for smoother riding.
It said the existing half pipe, which is part of the facility's heritage, will be retained and refurbished.
Doug Larsen Park will be closed until work is completed later this year.
Topics: human-interest, people, government-and-politics, sport, olympics-summer, local-government, extreme-sports, brisbane-4000, beenleigh-4207, logan-central-4114, qld, australia
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