Scootering

Scootering, Scooting, or simply scooter riding is a relatively new action sport. The popular kick scooters are used by the riders for doing tricks, in a similar way to skateboarding and BMX freestyle.

History

The origin of scootering is considered to be the 1999-2001 worldwide 'scooter craze'. At the time when light foldable aluminum scooters became popular amongst young people. Many of them understood the freestyle potential of this vehicle, and started doing tricks on it. One of the breakthrough moments of scootering was the year 2001, when Razor, the biggest American scooter company, assembled the first professional scooter team from some of the best riders of California. Jarrett Reid was on the team and one of the first two scooter riders to land a backflip. 2001 was also the year of the Core Tour scooter competitions which gathered a lot of publicity for the sport, as well as Jarrett's appearance on the Guinness World Records Primetime show on TV. The succeeding years brought the progress of the sport. 2005 was the beginning of serious competitive riding, as first big competitions were organized. Some skateparks, like The Incline Club in Lakewood, NJ, Skatebarn West in Renton, WA or ASSIR Empire Skate Building in Montreux, Switzerland are known of having organized a series of big scooter events. In 2007, scooters were featured in a big action sports event, the Australian Planet X Games. Even though the actual competition didn't happen due to some technical issues with the ramp, thousands of people enjoyed seeing riders pushing the limits during the exhibition session.

cooter Resource

Throughout the years after the scooter boom people who stuck with freestyle riding often didn't have anyone else to ride with, so they searched online for communities of riders to socialize with. Often a message board would pop up, and suddenly die as the owner abandoned it. Then a new forum would be created, and eventually it would die out too. This went on and on until January 2003, when Andrew Broussard of Vista, CA, created the [http://www.scooterresource.com Scooter Resource] . "SR", as it is commonly known to its users, has lasted through the years and is ever growing. Older users often complain about the "n00bs", or newbies, on the site who don't read the rules and search to find answers to their questions. SR has become the one and only place to view the latest and greatest scooter videos. The [http://www.scooterresource.com Scooter Resource] started off as "a forum of 14 year-olds fighting" and has turned into the only scooter community of its kind.Professional riders such as Anthony "Twan" Bustos, Andrew Broussard, Brandon Kilbury, and Brian Murphy, are the current members of the SR Pro team. As more and more people start to create their own freestyle scooter parts like forks, bars, decks, and more, they are also using those parts at their local skate parks to have fun and to spread the word of scootering. As the website [http://www.scooterresource.com Scooter Resource] continues to climb in popularity, members are into the 9,000s now, who are all people who scooter and know of the site. There are multiple scooter videos posted each day on Youtube by both veteran riders and new riders.

Park

area, due to the big variety and amount of skateparks available there. Street riders often look upon parks as a place to learn tricks to then take it to the street.

=Street=Street riding is another popular scootering style. Anything in the street can be used as a riding obstacle; the most typical ones are stairs, ledges, hubas, handrails and gaps of all kinds. Street riding is about creativity in using the urban environment to ride. Most scooter riders enjoy riding it to some extent, but only a handful of them declare themselves as the ones focusing strictly on riding street (some of them being riders with no skatepark access, who have no other possibility to ride scooters). This is because most scooter riders aren't used to this different environment.

Equipment and scooter modification

. However, to withstand the harsh riding conditions, certain modifications are performed to reinforce the scooter:

Locked folding mechanism

The folding mechanism of the scooter is disassembled, then the necktube is bolted to the deck using only three bolts or screws.
These are the bolts you will need to lock your folding mechanism once all of the original pieces are out.
Get these at your local hardware store (Brandon Kilbury's sizes)
-2 1/2" by 3/8" bolt
-2 1/2" by 5/16" bolt
-2 1/2" by 5/16" bolt
-washers

Bolted bars

The foldable handlebar design is highly inconvenient for freestyle scooter riders. That's why those who can't afford switching to aftermarket bars, drill through and bolt the stock bars to stop them from moving and to get rid of the clamp that can cause some pain when a knee is hit onto it when landing. Sometimes, a longer pipe is used instead of the original handlebars to provide a more comfortable grip for the ones preferring a bigger size. This pipe is often taken from a trolley, or shopping cart you can get them from any supermarket or normal shop.

Deck reinforcements

Stock decks are very prone to breaking after hard landings. To avoid this, they are reinforced with steel or aluminum flat bars or square pipes.
You can easily get these by buying them from Alex Steadman from this link.
[http://scooterresource.com/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?340573.0 Scooter Deck Reinforcements]

Aftermarket parts

Due to the scooter's technical similarity to other riding gear, scooter riders can utilize some of the non-scooter specific products to tune up their rides. This involves rollerblade speed skating metal-core wheels, skateboard bearings and griptapes and bicycle handle grips and headsets. There are also scooter specific upgrades available such as custom forks and one-piece handlebars. As of right now, the Scooter Resource, and WEE scooters are the biggest scooter companies around, due to the durability of their scooter parts. as of right now, WEE scooters is the only international distributor of scooter parts.

External links

* [http://www.scooterresource.com Scooter Resource] – The biggest online scooter community.
* [http://www.razor.com Razor USA]
* [http://www.seasonedscooters.com Seasoned Scooters]
* [http://weescooters.com Wee Scooters]