Lucas Puig Is Skater Of The Quarantine

Where to turn, as walls reach up, close in and hold us? The global plague hems in the living, and each day claims more dead. Shades of apocalypse waft from emptied supermarket shelves and block-deep lines for firearms. Covid-19 sank feverish hooks into Josh Stewart; authorities spread sand and mulch over skateparks and at others, in a truly bizarre twist, threaten to arrest kids. Bill Withers passed, another piece of the music died. Gone last week is Jeff Grosso, irascible and deadly earnest skate dad to us all, who wore his love for the life on his sleeve and tried to rub some onto yours, too. It is frustrating and unfair. Feels like losing a general in the middle of a war.

Mired in gloom, to whom to look to for hope? A swaggering, bearded and sometimes-shirtless Frenchman beckons, modeling responsible social distancing behaviours from within a picturesque seaside flat. Lucas Puig is the Covid-19 therapeutic the world needs to see through these dark, blurring-together days. Sequestered with his family and a seemingly fully equipped toolbox, the Helas chairman sees Instagram’s skate-at-home campaigns and raises bets to heady, often ridiculous levels. When pros and assorted bros were doing their best living room Kevin Bilyeu, Lucas Puig stepped out and kickflipped a damn shoe, pleasing fans and earning packs of high-profile imitators. He melds that credits-section standby, the laying-down flip trick, with Max Geronzi’s 2019 shaped-board beatdown into a 360 flip novelty act with better form than many traditional line-filler variants. Ocean breezes wafting in, he switch lazer flips it, and moves on to yet stranger realms, 360 flipping a brush-on-wheels and catching it a foot high, or unlocking the Kelly Hart three-times 360 flip achievement on a 2×4 — gripped, you neanderthals, of course.

Lucas Puig also provides street footage, crucially in the drought. In this week’s Jacky Biarritz video, a breezy seaside bro-cam affair, he is switch kickflip backside noseblunting and switch heel mute grabbing, backside tailsliding tall blocks and channeling countryman Bastien Salabanzi in both backside flip and post-make exhortation. He howls and cheers his friends as they careen into downhill stair sets and energetically pat their bellies, presumably fat with freshly-boated fish. Fellow shoreman Vincent Milou blasts a street gap kickflip suitable for any of the world’s major urban centers, Sammy Mould scoots a block-to-block noseblunt slide, Rafa Cort Lorente threads a hairy bench-gap ollie by the beach (all their spots seem to be by the beach). By the time Jeremie Plisson scrapes his way backside down a ‘Sorry’-scale hubba, Lucas Puig is beside himself, lifting the viewer’s spirits — and maybe, the whole world’s.

Even in the midst of this worldwide virus crisis, do we ‘deserve Lucas Puig’? With the potential for months more sheltering-in-place ahead, must Thrasher’s brain-trust now consider the prospect of suspending this year’s asterisk-burdened SOTY chase and instead name a Skater Of The Quarantine? How many viewers subsequently opened their Milton Martinez SOTY Thrasher issues to read Lucas Puig’s last and hopefully prescient ‘Firing Line’ quote — “cela aussi passera” — this too shall pass? Have you, dear reader, opened your wallet to support shops through this unnerving and horrendous time?

Tags: Bastien Salabanzi, cela aussi passera, chest hair, Helas, Jacky Biarritz, Jeremie Plisson, Kelly 'Challenger' Hart, Lucas Puig, Marshstomp, Pandemix, Rafa Cort Lorente, Sammy Mould, seaside abodes, Skater Of The Quarantine, social distinction, the French, Vincent Milous, waverunners