2008 Equipment from World Championships

Ok, the World Championships is over, but I’ve had a lot of catch-up work to do, so I just got around to the tallying. As I mentioned before, I went to the Worlds to check out the gear. It’s very important as an equipment distributor to see what the top skaters are skating on, and the Worlds is also a chance to see what’s new.

My research may not be 100% accurate, since I’m human after all, but it is rudimentarily scientific – I had a notebook and a pen and everytime a skater hit the track I wrote down what they were wearing.

BOOTS 
Boots were neat. Last year there seemed to be only really the big three (Bont, Luigino, Powerslide), but this year it was open season on boots. There were quite a few boots that I did not recognize and had to inquire about including the shiny gold boots with no name made by the Korean coach who didn’t want anyone talking about them.



I’d say well over half of the skaters were wearing full customs, but there were quite a few stock boots as well, most notably on the feet of Joey Mantia who had stock Luiginos. Although the Big Three topped out the charts in about even numbers, I spotted boots by Mariani, CadoMotus, Simmons, Tru-Rev, Cityrun, Canariam, Shenkel, and our homegrowns made-in-Canada boots handcrafted by Apex, SEB and EGC skates.

FRAMES 
Frames were also really interesting. Of course the 110mm dominated on men’s feet this year, as expected, as they were allowed for the first time. But I was surprised to see that about 80% of the women have also moved onto 110mm setups. A lot of men opted for a 3×110-1×100 setup in the sprint races and then changed to 4×110s for the marathon.

Many of the women were on a high-low 110mm frame for all of the events, including quite a few on a really neat 2×110-2×100 frame from Cado Motus that is 12.4” long. Those Cado Motus frames impressed me enough that we brought back quite a few pairs for our inventory. I think a shorter frame base will make is easier for skaters of both genders to move into 110s.

I also noticed not one, but two, highly decorated skaters who had traded in their sponsor’s frames for Cado Motus frames after sanding off the logos. My tally ultimately revealed that Luigino had more frames on the track and road than any other companies.

WHEELS 
Wheels were kinda boring. Matter continued its crushing dominance, especially if you consider the Atom wheel part of the family. And I had to, since sometimes they were hard to tell apart. There was some mixing of yellow and white Matters, and black hub and orange hub Atoms, but not a whole heck of a lot else going on.



Despite my best searching, I could not find a single wheel out there from lesser-known manufacturers like Tru-Rev, Gyro, Labeda, Sk8Force, StarGrip, AmWing, or even the once-deified Hyper. It seems that almost no one was taking chances.

The notable exception was MPC. They made a selective appearance, with quite a few women on the track on Street Fight Golds (but not men) and with everyone rushing the Cado Motus booth to get the Storm Surges for the rain. Oh yeah, and those crazy Koreans on mysterious MPC prototypes.

SKINSUITS 
The one area where I continue to be disappointed is in the skinsuit department, especially considering that these are national teams. Many of them range from horribly boring to just plain horrible and the competition for the ugliest suit is far tougher than the competition for the best.