Road ‘Sledders’ Pursue Thrills Across Legal Line
Life in the fast lane has its highs and its lows, Bob Pereyra has learned.
The highs include screaming around steep mountain curves in Agoura at 70 m.p.h. and watching the astonished expressions of passers-by left behind in a blur.
The lows are that Pereyra is only an inch off the pavement when he does this. And that what he does is illegal.
Pereyra is a self-styled “dry-land luger.” He builds and races 7-foot skateboards down the Santa Monica Mountains’ steepest and most winding roadway. On his back.
“It’s like the luge event in the Olympics, except ours run on wheels,” Pereyra, 25, said Friday. “You control it by tilting your body. You stick out your feet and drag your tennis shoes to stop it.”
Authorities who patrol Agoura’s back roads say they wish that Pereyra and his friends would do just that: Stop it.
A Los Angeles County ordinance prohibits riding a skateboard faster than 10 m.p.h. on any county street. It also bans skateboarders from traveling on a road that has a grade steeper than 3%, said Deputy Gary Stephens of the Sheriff’s Department’s legal staff.
“It’s a threat to others, even if they can control those things themselves,” Municipal Court Commissioner Robert McIntosh said. His Calabasas and Malibu courts handle traffic violations in the mountainous area. “They could well cause someone to go off the side of a canyon road trying to avoid them.”
Pereyra, a Northridge resident, says he and his fellow racers have never caused a wreck or been in one in the 5 years that they have raced on Mulholland Highway, Kanan Road and other canyon roadways around the San Fernando Valley.
“You can be going 60 m.p.h. and stop in 20 feet, faster than any car,” said racer Ken Kinnee, 26, of Agoura. “We’re faster than motorcycles on the curves because of the low center of gravity. When they crash, they die. We can crash every day and not get hurt.”
Pereyra, Kinnee and Pereyra’s brother, Greg, 20, also of Northridge, have formed a team and recruited sponsors to pay for competition costs and for the leather suits and motorcycle helmets they wear.
Sponsors include a tennis shoe company that gives them their “brake” shoes, a skateboard-wheel company and a scrap-metal company that provides the aluminum 2-by-4s that the six-wheeled racers are built with.
The trio has sold about 15 similar boards to people who have seen them race and decided to try it. The purchasers have become the group’s racing rivals.
Kinnee said the trio races on weekdays when a 2.3-mile section of Mulholland Drive above Agoura’s famous Rock Store motorcyclist hangout is sparsely traveled. A pace truck trails the racers in case of an accident.
He said the team is racing to sharpen its skills for the 1992 Winter Olympics, when the dry-land lugers hope to qualify for the U.S. ice luge team.
2 Tickets
Bob Pereyra is the only racer to run afoul of the law, according to the trio. He was ticketed about 2 years ago for exceeding the 10 m.p.h. skateboard speed limit when a California Highway Patrol officer clocked him zipping down Kanan Road at 65 m.p.h. Pereyra said he also received a speeding ticket for exceeding a regular 35 m.p.h. limit on a mountain road in Ventura County.
“It seems to me to be a very unsafe practice,” Officer Jim Young, a spokesman for the CHP’s West Valley station, said Friday. “If there is a collision with a motor vehicle on one of those blind curves, you know who’s going to get the worst of it.”
The street-level racers caused double takes during a practice run down Mulholland on Thursday.
“It’s just another California fad,” said Matt Kelch, an airline pilot from Thousand Oaks who followed the racers on his motorcycle. “I don’t know how you’d stop if a car came at you. Dragging your Reeboks is not gonna do it.”
Tourist Elizabeth Mitchell, visiting from Duncannon, Pa., for the Tournament of Roses Parade, whipped out her camera to record the scene.
“What are those things?” she asked. “People back home will say this is fitting for California.”
