Interview with Matt Pritchard
Matt recalls how inspired he was by Rob Shelley and his mates when he first started skating in Milton Keynes. Matt goes into detail about the tricks he has done and how confident he felt at the time. ’Pritchard Gap’ is a skate place named after Matt and he says he feels weird, but sees it as a complement, that children today refer to it still as ’Pritchard Gap’.
Matt would travel to Milton Keynes every weekend from Cardiff because ‘its the perfect place for skateboarding, all the blocks, the gaps, the stairs etc’. It was also where people like Shelley were skating, whom Matt admired and thinks was the ’face of Milton Keynes’. Matt explains that Cardiff did have a huge skate scene, but there was not much to skate before the Cardiff Bay development started. Matt sees the skate stoppers that the council put in as an extra challenge. Matt believes Milton Keynes has played a big role in skateboarding history. He explains that a lot of American teams used to come to Milton Keynes when they came to the UK as Milton Keynes is ’a great place to skate’.
For Matt, skateboarding gave him everything he has today. He believed it ’shaped the person he is’. Matt explains that as a teenager he felt lost. But he later worked for Globe Skateboard Shoes and had a Television show called ’Dirty Sanchez’ opportunities he had because of skateboarding. He explains how skateboarding gave him the platform to push himself; to go for bigger and better.
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