I was excited about the Shak Attack, a downhill race organized by Missile Racing & Fred Desjardins as I’ve been to a couple of events of the North-East Gravity Championship and knew it would be a great longboarding day. The races featured so far were all fun and friendly, open to beginners, but still technical and fast for more experimented riders to have fun.

The Shak Attack downhill race was on October 4th in Blainville, Montréal. The actual race was planned a week earlier but it got postponed, as it was pouring down rain the whole week. The race featured four corners and hairpins on a 9% grade of perfect pavement. The organizer wrote about the race: «IT'S FAST AND CHALLENGING» in capital letters! It was a three-man heats race in a jam format with a point system. Each rider had to complete ten runs to qualify.

Crash Corner, Maxim and A.J. Powell

Those ten runs were exhausting as we had to walk up the steep hill after each run. The course was definitely the fastest and most challenging one so far, with a tight 90° right corner where almost everybody hit the hay bail.

Cyril, Maxim and March, Crash corner bail

I finally completed my ten runs. I lost a couple of them, but won most and got a final score of 14. I was tied with three others guys: Javier, Matthew Kienzle and J-F Boily. We had to do a final run, the battle for the 7th place. J-F decided to pull out, so it was another three-man heat. The race was sketch: Javier took the lead, Matthew and I ended up in the grass at some point after our wheels touched. I stayed in front of Matthew for the rest of the heat, getting 8th place.. That was a really sketchy tie breaker! After a complete days of racing down this hill, I was exhausted as well as everyone else. There was a communal BBQ after the race, a great moment to get to know people we raced with during the day.

The podium :

1. NIKO DESMARAIS 2. SIMON BENOIT 3.AJ POWELL 4.YANN LHERMITTE 5.CYRIL SHROEDER 6.BENJAMIN DUBREUIL 7.JAVIER PALOMINO 8.MAXIM GARANT ROUSSEAU

Events like this show one thing: downhill skateboarding is definitely growing. There were probably about 40 riders coming from different cities, a thing we would not have seen two or three year ago. The riders are younger as well; there is this boy who must be eight or nine and shows up to all the races and he's kicking asses! Lot of people said downhill skateboarding would die in Quebec because the Top Challenge is not happening this year; local events are showing that our roots are growing and that people here are longboarding first for adrenaline, pleasure and freedom.

JF Boily, Mikaël Bottreau, François Gonthier

People here are starting to clean the dust off their snowboards now as winter is coming, but there are still couple of events before the snow invades our streets. This Saturday, there is the First Annual Montreal Push Race and, the following day, the Mac Attack, a downhill and street luge downhill race, the last one in the North-East Gravity Championship. Stay tuned for the full story and photos of that crazy weekend to come!

Special Thanks to Marc-Antoine Vachon and Guillaume Perras for the pictures and Myriam Arsenault-Jacques cause she helped me write this.