Daredevil competitors in the fledging sport called ‘dry land luge’ hit 80 in the illegal, deadly, feet-first pursuit of . . . : Downhill Thrills

A trio of beach-bound young surfers, boards stacked in their VW convertible, screeched to a stop at a turnout, craned their necks and peered back in disbelief. “Those guys up there friends of yours?” one asked. Then he grinned. “PSYCHO!”

Rolling back into sight, feet first--at about 60 m.p.h.--around a curve on Encinal Canyon Road, high above Malibu, were four men on skateboards, their bodies prone, only an inch or two off the pavement.

They are pioneers, who, after six years on the fringe, are seeking legitimacy for their sport, a hybrid of ice luge, the popular Olympic event, and skateboarding. Some call it downhill skateboarding; they prefer “dry land luge.”

For maybe a decade, underground racers have been experimenting. For Ken Kinnee, 28, and Bob Pereyra, 27, it started one spring day in 1984, as they sat on Mulholland Highway, listening to music and pondering the meaning of life. Only a few months before, Pereyra’s brother had been killed near the spot in a motorcycle accident. “We made a pact,” Kinnee recalls. He told Pereyra, who had raced cars and motorcycles professionally, “I don’t want to be your friend if you keep doing this.”

Together they hit on the idea of dry land luge. On their first attempt, they stood on the boards; that idea was scrubbed after Kinnee took a bad spill on Mulholland. Then they tried sitting, holding their feet and head up. That lasted a few months, Kinnee recalls, “until our stomach muscles couldn’t take it.”

Soon, the two made longer boards. Over the years, a skinny aluminum sled, 7- to 8-feet-long, with urethane wheels, evolved. Depending on the skill and daring of the “pilot,” it has a downhill potential of close to 90 m.p.h.

“It’s a suicide mission, unless you’re safety conscious,” acknowledges Scott Sotebeer, a free-lance marketing consultant who has been brought in to help sell dry land luge as another Southern California-bred craze.

Early on a Sunday morning, a handful of devotees meet at a Jack-in-the-Box in Agoura, boards atop their cars, black and red leather jumpsuits and helmets inside. Destination: The crest of Encinal Canyon Road, from where it’s downhill all the way to Pacific Coast Highway.

The group includes Pereyra, an auto detailer; Kinnee; Jeff Levy, 23, a carpenter; Rob Munsey, 26, a print shop employee, and his friend, Lisa Guardino, 22, a floral designer.

The two-lane highway that curves and twists down to the ocean is their race course. They speak of the beauty of their sport, of how it can be done on any mountain road.

But this is a road they must share with two-way traffic.

The lugers suit up, pulling on their “leathers” and high-top canvas shoes with rubber soles and, finally, full-face fiberglass helmets. Pereyra, tying his shoe, says, “For somebody who has the want to go out racing, this sport is the most feasible. There’s no chance of falling and hurting yourself.”

He smiles and says, “You can’t get attached to a pair of shoes. You’ll lose them by the end of the day.” He doesn’t mean lose them, exactly; he means burn them out. These boards, which cost about $175, have no brakes; boarders stop by dragging their feet on the pavement.

Gravity is their motor. They steer by leaning, which they refer to as “hanging a leg” or “hanging a shoulder,” sometimes dragging a shoulder on the pavement.

It is quiet up here, very quiet. No engines, no fuel smells.

The lead car, a black Jeep, pulls onto the highway and, behind it, four lugers roll out, flat on their boards, pushing off with gloved hands. As their speed builds, the sound of wheels on pavement builds to a loud rumble.

Behind them, a chase car guards their patch of highway.

This is not a race; it is practice. By midday they make three or four runs, the last an uninterrupted five-mile, five-minute thrill ride to the bottom, with Kinnee riding in the shadow of the Jeep, at one point touching the bumper with his feet.

Cars come up the hill slowly; their passengers gawk.

The lugers are used to this. Most people think they are motorcyclists who have fallen, and they wonder what happened to the cycles. Some are horrified--”You’re animals!” Others are titillated. Pereyra says, “Once we had a car full of elderly people go by and as they passed us they were clapping.”

He adds, “We’ve had people ask if the Highway Patrol knows about this. But we’ve never been yelled at, ‘Get off the road, you maniacs!’ ”

He emphasizes, “We’re not out here just joking around. We’re out here to do something serious.” Without hesitation, he adds, “We are the Indianapolis of our sport.”

Perhaps. But, because of a lack of funds--and, so far, major corporate sponsorship--this Indy is without a course on which to practice. Closing a road and hiring off-duty officers costs money and the Land Luge International Racing Assn., which Kinnee has formed as the official sanctioning body, is in its infancy.

So, for now, they must share the road with the cars. It is necessity, not some devil-may-care streak, that dictates this arrangement, says Kinnee, the father of two small sons. He, as much as anyone, understands the dangers of the open highway.

Four months ago, zipping down Encinal Canyon, he came out on the short end in a run-in with a three-quarter-ton truck. He describes what happened:

“We were skating on the road when this truck came down in front of me,” pulling out from a side road. He figures he was doing 70 m.p.h., the truck a little faster, when the driver waved him around. After that, the details are fuzzy.

“The first thing I remember is a tire was coming down over the top of my helmet. . . . I got spun around under the truck. I guess the guy hadn’t noticed he’d run me over.”

The front wheels ran over Kinnee, then, as he tried desperately to maneuver his board between the rear wheels to escape, he was run over again.

Kinnee wound up on the other side of the road, lying across his board, feet uphill. “I broke my arm in about 30 places, broke both shoulder blades, my right ankle and my left knee.” Six weeks later, he was out of his casts--and back on his skateboard.

He is philosophical. “I was doing something I should not have been doing”--skating in front of an inexperienced chase-car driver who let another vehicle in, and passing a car on his board. “That’s a no-no,” he says. “Nobody does that anymore.”

Rolling down the highway at 60-plus m.p.h. may get the adrenaline pumping, but is it legal?

“Certainly not,” says Sgt. Terry Enright of the California Highway Patrol’s Malibu station. He points out a county ordinance prohibiting skateboarding in any form on a county road with more than a 3% grade or in excess of 10 m.p.h.

“It’s almost suicide, is what it is,” says Sheriff’s Deputy Wayne Encinas, who works out of Malibu. “People driving their vehicles, they can’t even see these guys coming downhill because they’re prone to the highway. It’s outrageously dangerous.”

Enright says the CHP has issued citations to the skateboarders for interfering with traffic, but he is not aware of any vehicular accidents caused by them. “It hasn’t been a big problem.”

He adds, “Typically, someone riding a skateboard downhill on a canyon road has picked a spot that is somewhat remote . . . and we don’t have the statistical data that establishes that we should be in the canyon roads looking for skateboarders. In the Malibu area, we have a lot of major accidents on Pacific Coast Highway and the major canyon roads.”

In his view, it’s “only common sense that someone lying on a very low device on the roadway is not going to be highly visible to motor vehicle traffic. Certainly, that is an incredible hazard. There’s also a danger to the skateboard rider if they just fall off. That’s two counts against them, their low visibility and the possibility of them colliding with a 3,500-pound car.”

Kinnee worries that onlookers will spot one skater, take their eyes off the road and fail to see other skaters. “I like making eye contact” with oncoming drivers, he says.

Kinnee has heard of one fatality--out of state--and he knows of one other skater who was run over. He and his team--Max Racing--were clocked at 86 m.p.h. during a night run on Kanan Road, a world record. “That’s too fast,” he says--unless the road is closed to traffic.

Early on, the dry land lugers gained a reputation as daredevils, an image they are eager to shake. Thus, they turned down a request from a national tabloid to do something crazy, like skate through a blazing hay bale; they did agree to skate under a monster truck.

“We’re not a sideshow,” Pereyra says. The thrill of the road, skaters say, is not ducking automobiles; it is speed and control and camaraderie and trust. He looks for the day when the downhill skateboarders can practice and compete on safe, sanctioned courses, perhaps ski resorts in summertime.

He isn’t sure it will ever be a major spectator event, reasoning it lacks the sex appeal of crashing cars. But in “dream time,” he envisions major sponsorship and major television coverage and maybe even an Olympic event.

Kinnee points to tattoos on both his arms and notes, “The biggest mistake I ever made. I was 14 years old.” Major corporate sponsors like squeaky clean images, not tattoos.

But he is thinking big. He still does some auto detailing (a Motley Crue member, he says, was a client). Mostly, though, he’s banking on dry land luge, having sunk $30,000 into promoting it.

In 10 years, he says, “I’d be disappointed if we weren’t on an equal par with NASCAR (the National Assn. for Stock Car Racing),” whose leading money winner tops $2 million a year.

And, he says, smiling, “I plan on being a multimillionaire.”

For now, there are about 160 association members worldwide and, Kinnee estimates, about five times that number experimenting with dry land luge, some of them head-first skaters. Kinnee thinks those people are crazy: “I can’t imagine having my head be the first thing that’s going to hit. You’d wind up looking like one of those dogs with the flat faces.”

On this morning, up in the Santa Monica Mountains, one of the lugers’ favorite spots (the others are in Saugus and Glendora), Lisa Guardino, a 5-foot-1 novice, is on her second run. Rob Munsey has made several runs and now, from the chase car, he watches her and says, “This makes me nervous.”

The driver of the car laughs and says, “If my girlfriend did this, I don’t know what I’d do to take her out for thrills.”

Suddenly, there is trouble ahead. Guardino loses control and swerves onto the shoulder. She has “high-sided,” let her board tip on edge. A nasty cut on her thumb requires an emergency room trip and a few stitches.

What does a luger see, zooming down the highway parallel to the pavement? “The top of your feet, your stomach--and the whole road ahead,” Munsey says.

With no motor, no brakes and no steering wheel, who or what is in control? Pereyra says the pilot is totally “in command.” He points out that a skater going 80 m.p.h. can come to a complete stop in the length of a telephone pole--better by far than a car can do--and that, unlike a downhill biker, he faces no danger of a brake cable breaking.

With his bent left arm temporarily immobilized by metal plates, Kinnee is, for the moment, a “one-hander,” which precludes his competing in races. Racing rules stipulate holding on with both hands. The association, which hopes to stage its first sanctioned competition in the Los Angeles area this fall, also specifies that racers must be age 18 or over and must wear protective gear (the leathers cost about $285 and the helmets about $350). Dry land luge is a unisex sport, with women and men competing side by side.

Each team has developed its own hand signals to indicate, for example, that the lead car should speed up or that there is danger ahead. And each pilot has developed a feel for the road. They know, for example, that riding on the white road stripe increases their speed.

Speed is their high. “I love going fast. I can’t lie about that,” Pereyra says. “It is dangerous, and I accept that.” But, he says, “Jumping out of airplanes, all those things, are a lot more crazy than this.”

The dry land lugers have what they describe as an uneasy relationship with traditional skateboarders. Some lugers’ jargon is borrowed from them, some of it from car and motorcycle racers. “Dicing” is changing positions. A “slingshot move” is a pull out-and-pass maneuver. An air pocket is a “draft.” And they will say, “Let’s go skate.”

Along with the thrills, they have collected speeding tickets. None of these luge enthusiasts claims that the sport is without peril. Jeff Levy says, “I always say a prayer before I go down the hill. I want to know someone is there overlooking me . . . once you get through those first few turns, everything’s fine.”

Pereyra admits, “I’ve been doing this for six years and I still can’t watch anybody do it.” This day, he will clip a reflector in the center of the road with his elbow, raising a nasty bump beneath his leathers.

The greatest dangers are that a vehicle will veer into their lane or that the skater will lose control and cross lanes. Lugers hit the road in early morning. Levy explains, “The traffic coming home from the beach is all against us. The two don’t mix.”

“If we’d wanted to play tag with cars,” Pereyra says, “we’d have been dead years ago.”

As their visitor drives away, Pereyra and Kinnee caution, “Be careful out there!”