Wipeout on World’s Largest Skateboard
Wipeout on world’s largest skateboard worth a million laughs
By: Pete Thomas, GrindTV.com
The over-sized but otherwise realistic contraption is 36 feet 7 inches long, nearly nine feet wide and weighs 3,800 pounds.
It requires a group of people to successfully ride and even then it’s usually a short and precarious journey that results in a highly comical wipeout.
So it was predictable that when California Skateparks owner and board co-designer Joe Ciaglia recently tried to give the WLS a solo-whirl down a grassy knoll, he was forced to bail from and nearly trampled by an out-of-control unit that flipped in a wild crash farther down the hill.
What might also have been predictable was that the madcap episode would end up on YouTube and be witnessed by more than a million people.
“Obviously with me falling it got a lot more attention that it would have had I not fallen,” Ciaglia said. “If you look closely my foot hit the tire and my shoe got knocked off.”
It also helped, from a popularity standpoint, that the original WLS was unveiled during a 2009 episode of MTV’s “Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory,” and that the celebrity/skater designed the board with the help of Ciaglia.
That board is in Dyrdek’s warehouse. The latest model, owned by Ciaglia and referred to simply as “the big skateboard,” is an exact replica and was recently displayed at New York’s Times Square. It has been featured on commercials and will be used as a prop when Dyrdek’s new Street League skateboarding tour debuts Aug. 28 in Arizona.
The board is made of wood and a thin layer of steel, has oversized skateboard trucks and automobile tires instead of skateboard wheels.
Ciaglia said the most effective way to ride the big skateboard is to use five people and have a person above each tire. The pilot begins in the middle and walks from side to side, barking instructions such as “hard right” or “hard left” to get the others to step to the proper side at the proper moment.
“If you get too many people they tend to overreact and it gets out of control,” Ciaglia said.
So it will be interesting to watch — and you can count on a video production — when Ciaglia and his crew attempt to shatter the Guinness World Record (currently 26 people, Ciaglia says) with a ride of 100 yards or more with 40 people on board.
“We’re going to do it; it’s just a matter of when and where we can do it,” the skatepark designer said.
