Saturday, December 9

Invert Dirt Jumping Coverage

By Scot McElwaney
BMXonline.com

Invert is billed as a "Vertical Sports Carnival," it basically brings a lot of companies under the same roof to vend alongside BMX, Skateboarding, Motocross, and MTB competitions. It only happens once a year and last year I was still living in Athens, Georgia so I wanted to make sure that I got to see it this year. I already had plans for the weekend so the only chance I would have to stop by would be on Friday. Not a problem, or so I thought.

It always happens that just when I think that I have everything planned out perfectly something happens to ball things up. This was the case on the weekend of Invert 2000. I thought that I would be able to head over to the Anaheim convention center on Friday to cover the dirt jumping contest. On Saturday, James Ayres would be there to check out the sprint trials and Jared Souney would be hanging out with Kevin Robinson so he could cover the vert contest. It was supposed to work out perfectly, I would be able to get every BMX competition covered and only have to go to Invert for one day.

On Friday, 7pm rolls around and I'm still sitting in the office trying to upload pages onto BMXonline. The contest starts in less than an hour and James is pressuring me to get the days work wrapped up so we can get out of here. So far it doesn't look like it's going to happen. The clock strikes 8pm and we're heading out the door. Two minutes later we're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I think I have made my feelings clear regarding California drivers and the traffic here, so I am going to skip the rant this time. I call up Losey and he tells me that he left 45-minutes ago, just as the finals were about to begin. There's no way I am going to make it in time to see anything so I turn around and go home.

Sure, I don't have to deal with traffic now, but I don't have anything to write about the dirt jumping contest either. Well, I guess that is the trade-off with doing an Internet magazine. You try to keep the information as current as possible, so when you have something new to put on the site, you want to get it up right then and there. Unfortunately, uploading new pages doesn't always go as planned and you get stuck working later than you wanted to. So, instead of me telling you what I saw happen at the Invert dirt jumping contest, I'm going to tell you about what I heard happened. This won't take long.

Jay Miron (MacNeil) won dirt at Invert. That's right, Jay Miron. Some of you may not remember this, but Jay also won the first X Games gold medal in dirt jumping as well. It just goes to show you that he is a true all-around rider. A 360 tailwhip over the first set and a 360-table-to-turndown were his two best tricks.

Allan Cooke (Specialized) and Cory Nastazio (Huffy) wrapped up the top three but unfortunately the only person I know that saw finals is Keith Mulligan, and it's hard to tell what's going on when your behind the camera the whole time.

So that's all I have for you. I know that James and Jared did a much better job covering the sprint trials and the vert contests than I did with dirt. How could they not have? At least they showed up!