Podcast timestamp: 23:57 - 27:26

Mikey Lynch: It’s funny, isn’t it? Like Arlo Eisenberg is seen historically as a street skater because of the Hoax videos and stuff but he’d skate vert as well, right? And was in some of those early competitions skating vert and was a really solid vert skater as well. And yet again, someone gravitates in a particular direction for a combination of what they’re most wired to and a whole bunch of other factors.

César Mora: Yeah, and this is another thing, okay, I’m glad you brought that up because Arlo could skate vert but a lot of people didn’t know that he was actually a good vert skater. But Australians, us, and the Kiwi’s too, we just all skated. We skated vert and then we’d go and street skate, and then we’d go back on the mini ramp and then we’d go to the skatepark. We just all skated. We didn’t section it off. That came later, that’s kind of what killed our sport. But that came later and in America it was like you’re either this or you’re that, you know? But in Australia it was just like, whether you were good or bad, you just road everything. You went everywhere and you skated everywhere. If there was a ramp everyone had a go on the ramp and if there was a rail everyone had a go. My god, the amount of times I killed myself on a rail, but we just did it.

Mikey Lynch: So killed our sport? So you reckon that it cut things up too small and splint things apart?

César Mora: We weren’t strong enough. We were barely strong enough united to compete against skateboarding and BMX and ESPN and the whole thing. The established sports. It was already a struggle, I was over there and I was seeing it happen. Then we divided ourselves and we had street get mad at vert for whatever reason. It was funny because you’d get guys saying “I don’t skate street I just do banks” or “I just do park” What do you mean you just do.. So you just do park that’s it? [...] We’re just so separated now. There’s no way we can survive because you know how they say, divide and conquer, or whatever.

And another thing […] With ESPN they want to promote the sport, they want American heroes, we didn’t have an American Hero in our sport [inline vert] over there. So they couldn’t promote anything, so they’d rather promote the Dave Mirra tour, the Tony Hawk tour, that was all good, but in our sport [inline vert] we had a couple Aussies, a couple Japanese who didn’t speak english, a french guy who was from Europe, there was no American hero and we were the newer sport […] so since they owned the Dave Mirra tour and the Tony Hawk tour it was in their interest to promote those sports. We kind of shot ourselves in the foot and it was hard to survive after that.

Mikey Lynch: And so I mean it was partly in a sense, that, that sectioning off meant that emphasis within the aggressive skating community in the US so swung toward emphasizing street that it didn’t create a healthy kind of farming system out of which American vert skaters could come alongside street skaters, was that what you saw happening within the American skating scene?

César Mora: Yeah, you were either one or the other and very few respected both.

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