Bastien ego story:
A french friend told me a story years back about Bastien:
There was some vans funded comp in France where the skaters were divided into teams and and the winner was chosen by a sum of the whole teams scores. Bastien skated very well but the rest of his team didn’t cut it and as a result his team didn’t win the comp. there was a congratulatory champagne bottle at the judges table and when finding out he lost Bastien smashed the bottle on the table and threatened the judge, a vans employee, swearing and shouting that he would have him fired and he would never work for vans again.
I always thought it sounded insane but completely believable. I don’t suppose anyone could corroborate the story?
Haven't heard that story in particular but many a similar one so I wouldn't be surprised, back in the day Bastien's contest or demo antics were always hot topics, he would regularly show up under influence of stuff and do wild shit. My two favorite stories are the one where he showed up too coked up to land a trick on a park rail, so he logically started talking to the rail, first threatening it then trying to bribe it with handfuls of cash into letting him do his trick (?), that's with a whole crowd watching; and also the one where he showed up to a demo he really had nothing to do with uninvited (I think an éS, DVS or V7 demo? it was over fucking fifteen years ago) just to show everyone up, from which he got kicked out of. Looking back at that time period, it feels like every skater in France had a crazy Bastien story at some point that really didn't help paint him in a good light.
To this day though, I feel bad for him about that 'lost part' of his. Dude was so good on a skateboard it took a good ten years for all the pioneering shit he had filmed in the mid 00's to ever see the light of the day, like the whole industry camped on those clips until they'd have lost most of their relevance. Had that avant-garde part come out in due time instead of getting all tangled up in industry shit, I'm sure it would have impacted skateboarding a lot more than it eventually did ten years too late. Wouldn't be surprised if living with that mistake equaled hell for Bastien. In a way, by keeping that footage hostage for a decade, companies basically chose to hinder the potential of skating's progression just because it wouldn't directly benefit them; now business is business, but from the skaters' perspective that just screams disconnection and kind of sucks.
To this day, Adrien Bulard keeps the flame alive by (getting caught) stealing whole Red Bull fridges from indoor skateparks at contests (as well as the leftover beer at parties). Got kicked out of and banned from the FISE last year as well, for a reason I would actually love to get the chance to hear in detail (an article I had written on the dude eventually never came out because of that last minute ban).
Topic: Bastien gofundme (Read 23080 times)