Like many of you know, Van Wastell passed away recently. I came across a thread on a forum i post on with a link to an article Ny Times wrote up on him that was really good. Here's the link to check it out and a little exerpt of it..
"By name alone, he seemed bound for stardom — Van Wastell, born into a renowned snowboarding family, called by the moniker of a storied skateboarding brand.
Before his 20th birthday, Wastell was hurtling toward that destiny on urethane wheels. Touring the country with an incandescent crew of trundling acrobats, he set himself apart with deft athleticism, prodigious creativity and a devil-may-care public image. By his early 20s, he had earned the laurel of full arrival, a signature board produced by a major skating gear company.
“I was and always will be a huge fan of Van’s skating,” the blogger Dan Watson wrote on Youwillsoon, a skateboarding site. Wastell had “amazing style and originality that was a breath of fresh air in a world of cookie-cutter robot kids.”
But when his body was found last month in the alley behind a hotel in Berlin, apparently the victim of a fall, Wastell, 24, became the subject of intrigue.
Through public appearances and staged film shorts, he had cultivated a reputation for drinking heavily on tour. In death, he has drawn unwelcome attention to a largely unspoken aspect of his sport. At the professional level, many skateboarders answer to the demands of elite athleticism while carrying on with wild abandon, to the approval of a mostly young male audience.
As the German authorities have pursued their investigation, skaters around the world have turned to online forums to mourn, mythologize, speculate and rant. Wastell’s main sponsor, Krooked Skateboarding, has forged ahead in promoting his signature board.
Representatives for Krooked and its copyright owner, Mark Gonzales, a professional skateboarder and artist, did not respond to calls and e-mail messages. A representative of its parent company, S. F. Deluxe Productions of San Francisco, declined to comment, as did the Wastell family.
One of Wastell’s brothers, Eddie Villa, wrote on his Web site, “Van touched people all around the world, and surprised me when kids from all over the world would tell me how sick of a skater he was and how cool he was for showing people that you can put on a Matix flannel and skate and be completely respected.”
Check out the Article for the rest of the story.
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