Mirraco team photoshoot in Paris. Part 1. By BdJ (6-3-2009)

Feb 05, 2016

Written by Bart de Jong

Read 8677 times

On Monday morning after the FISE contest in Montpellier Sean Hargraves, Ryan Guettler and Andy Buckworth made it to the 12h23 TGV train to Paris. However at 12h00 Maxime Charveron and Dave Rytell were still missing. Sean had the tickets for both of them and they literally had to run to the train station in order to make the ride. The train was running late (strike in France?!) so the two met up with the others and were off to Paris for a few days of shooting pics for the Mirraco site, the 2010 online catalog

and ads. On Monday afternoon I met up with them in Paris. We checked into the Concorde La Fayette hotel and walked over to the Arc de Triomphe and had dinner on the Champs-Elysees. It felt good to be in Paris. The next two days would be full of "work".

Fortunately we had Paris local Thomas Revest around to show us the spots. On Tuesday morning right when we were about to cruise through the city it started to rain. Good street spots are hard to find but good INDOOR spots are even harder to come by. Thomas had to think hard and almost forgot about his local spot at Paris-Bercy. It was a covered spot full of ramps which actually wasn't bad at all. I expected some ghetto ramps under a bridge but it was more like a public skatepark with quarters, some rails and a decent mini ramp. The graffiti backgrounds made for some interesting pics and we were well on the way to gathering photo material. Rytell and Charveron had missed the wake up call, missed breakfast and showed up a little later. They live in a different time zone.

Thomas then showed us this spot which has a security guard on a bicycle. It takes the security guard 40 minutes to take one lap. The brick quarters are great but we got busted within the first 3 minutes. We were asked to leave, which we did with the plan of coming back a little later. We had spotted a Paris sign a few hundred yards from the spot and decided to go take some pics there. Attempt number two was a bit more successful but it did not last over 5 minutes. Let's call it bad luck but we did get some pics at this spot too.

Up next was a bridge which had a few options close by. Maxime sessioned some stairs and crashed on his already sore ass from the FISE comp. Dave Rytell did the banger on this location as he got up high on a bridge from the concrete bank that lead up to it. Ryan and Andy had headwind on the gap they wanted to do. The work-out was bigger than the end result but the gap was cleared. Back in the Vito and the Sharon and on to the next "trannie" or "bank".

Paris has loads to offer, you just need to know where to look. With Thomas' help we cruised from spot to spot. Up next was a cobble stone hip that the Aussies hit up for 45 minutes while Maxime and Rytell fixed a flat. The scary part here was that you could land in the water as it was next to a lake. Everyone stayed dry. We rode a few laps on the nearby asphalt BMX track and decided to check the brick banks in between some ghetto flats. It looked awesome but the area is quite ghetto so we kept the camera gear in the backpacks and pedaled to the next spot across the street. Again enough banks for a session and some good pics. The day was becoming a productive one. After this we cruised over to one more spot (small trannie to wall) before we hit up the nearby Quick for some food. Got free icecream from the Quick crew which was cool.

On the way back to the cars we stopped by the brick bank spot which had less gansters around this time. Still we got out of there when people started to come out of their flats... One last move of the day was Buckworth's corckscrew ride on a bridge. He made it look easy but ask Guettler how easy it was. He tried it once and almost fell to the bottom of it.

It was back to the city center in search for the hotel. Checked the pics on the computer and then fell asleep. Next day, same program. Check back tomorrow for a little report what happened on day two with the Mirraco crew in Paris.

BdJ