If the World Skateboarding Tour brings together skateboarders of the world in a kind of circular flowering, then those roots stretch out like spokes from the WST hub to a whole lot of very different backgrounds from which each of our skateboarders came.
In this new series, we will follow individual skaters from the World Skateboarding Tour back to their home stomping grounds to see not just where they come from but the scenes from which they come to join the Tour.
Ph: Atiba
Our first episode focuses on the charismatic twenty-year-old Dutchwoman Keet Oldenbeuving from Utrecht in the Netherlands. From dragging a grind rail out the front of her house to featuring in video parts for Nike and Santa Cruz Skateboards, Keet has already managed to strike a sponsorship balance few achieve in this day and age.
Currently lying 21st in the WSR, she is one of two Dutch skateboarders among the top 5 Europeans in Women’s Street- and there is a very good reason for that.
Ph:Atiba
Dutch skateboarding, like neighbouring Belgium, relies on indoor skateparks to keep continuity running through their scenes purely because they get a lot of rain. The Netherlands have loads of great indoor skateparks- Park Amsterdam, Area 51 in Eindhoven, Venlo, Ladybird in Tilburg, World Skate Center (no relation) in Den Bosch among them.
Each of them supports not only their own local scene, but visitors from around the country too- because here is the great thing about the Dutch skateboarding scene: they actually support and promote indoor skateparks as good things, where other scenes pull faces about what constitutes legitimacy in skateboarding. Big ups to Flatspot Magazine in that regard.
Ph: Atiba
So in the Netherlands, the local and national skate scenes get a good mixing through those indoor parks which allow their scene to flourish and grow in terms of participation. Individual parks become scene hubs themselves, and nowhere is this more true than the World Skate Center in Den Bosch just an hour’s journey from Keet’s Utrecht hometown.
Ph: Atiba
This state of the art indoor skatepark and events space not only allows Keet to keep pace with competitors from the lands of near year-round sunshine, but also allows her to inspire the new generation as a coach of the Bright Youth Skateboard Talents (BYST) Academy who host European Skatecamps there.
Ph: Darwen
We followed Keet for a day of coaching at the park she helped design to learn not only how her WST experience feeds back into youth coaching, but also what she feels makes the Dutch skate scene one of Europe’s raddest.
Enjoy!