Welcome to the World’s Largest Skatepark

glideonk2

• November 01 2005
• 4 comments

How many times have you been bored and began drawing your dream skatepark to help pass the time? Your imagination can run wild with a blank piece of paper, but just imagine if that piece of paper was larger than three football fields.Yes, you read that correctly, three football fields! With that much room you could build things never seen before, and your park could literally go on and on and on. Just imagine…

That may sound like a fantasy, but that’s exactly what happened in New Jiangwan, China, right outside of Shanghai. The city wanted to have a progressive park, and the Australian design firm Convic went to work constructing the new SMP park. The word “massive” describes the place perfectly, but in more than one way. There are so many different areas to ride that it’s roughly the equivalent of six or seven parks, and that doesn’t even include the vert ramp! And as for the size of the bowls, there are some good five and six-footers, but there are also 17-foot deep monsters, a massive fullpipe, handlebar-high ledges, and so much more. If you were to crash and get hurt in some of the bowls, you’d have a bad day trying to get yourself back to the deck, but I guess that’s just motivation not to crash.

Four pro BMXers were flown to Shanghai for a competition at the grand opening of the SMP park. The strange part is that with all of the incredible bowls, a separate “Contest” section was also built with a boring box jump, quarterpipe, etc. The four US riders (Dennis McCoy, Koji Kraft, Tom Stober, and Tom Haugen) definitely seemed more psyched on the cement than the contest, but they still put in their competition time, with DMC winning vert and Koji winning park. The rest of the riders’ time in China was spent buying bootleg everything in the black markets and eating amazing meals for about six bucks.

Honestly, the contest that went down at the SMP park paled in comparison to simply looking at and riding the rest of the park. For the rest of the story, check out the photos and make sure to go to www.convic.com and click on the China link. DMC summed up the place perfectly with the following quote: “I laughed the first time I saw the new park in Shanghai. It’s a bike rider’s dream come true, complete with granite coping. The park is unbelievable. Almost as unbelievable as the fact that taxpaying BMXers in America are getting fined for sessioning ‘public’ parks while communist China allows motorcycles in its 12-million-dollar playland.”