Leo Romero talks Grinding Up Handrails & ‘Stay Gold’

Taking it back to 2009, Leo Romero discusses the genesis of grinding up handrails throughout filming for Emerica‘s Stay Gold.

Interview and edit by Farran Golding • Footage courtesy of Emerica from Stay Gold and Stay Gold — ‘The B-Sides’ • Videography by Jon Miner, Mike Manzoori, Jeff Henderson & Beagle.

Imprinting memorable tricks onto skateboarding’s audiovisual tapestry is a hallmark of a strong video part. Leo Romero, however, defined an entire subgenre of skateboarding in Stay Gold, Emerica’s 2009 full-length video, by grinding up a handful of waist-height handrails. Inspired by an etnies BMX video, coupled with his party move for skating demos, Leo’s name remains synonymous with flipping the script on handrail skating even some fifteen years later. In this excerpt from his interview in Closer Skateboarding #6 — ‘An Audience with Leo Romero’ — he reflects on those days.

An excerpt from ‘An Audience with Leo Romero’, originally published in Closer Skateboarding #6

Skateboarders who are conscious of keeping a career going often start switching things up a little around their mid-to-late 30s. After having ankle surgery earlier this year do you see yourself going anywhere different from here?

It’s funny, my body feels fine until I take a bad one – the trouble is that it takes longer to heal than it used to. I don’t feel like I need to adjust too much of my skating to go on. As the way the river flows, you’ve got to adapt. You can have the same momentum but a different way to get there. I started grinding tall, long rails which I never did before and that’s been an occurrence for the past four or five years. I don’t know where that came from but creatively I’ve moved that way. There had been peaks of that when I was younger, like grinding up stuff, so my skating is a little different in certain aspects but the same in a lot of aspects.

Backside 180 — Nashville, Tennessee from Closer #6. photo: Jaime Owens

I think going up handrails has been considered “your thing” ever since Stay Gold [2009]. What got you sparked on those?

I went to an etnies premiere for Grounded [2007], a BMX video, and they were all grinding up stuff. I thought it was so cool. That mixed with being at demos and skating every type of obstacle, every which way, is what formed it. I wasn’t doing it street skating, it was a “demo thing” that I’d throw out there because it would be fun to see kids’ expressions. Also, it was told to me to try, people would say I should start grinding up handrails and it worked. What definitely inspired the idea though was this etnies BMX video.

Can you remember your early attempts at figuring them out?

Just those in Stay Gold as they were the main ones I did. I liked to try do as “real” handrails as I could. That’s one thing: if it’s super low at the bottom or top, it still counts but we all know what a handrail is. We all like to “cheat” a little bit when it comes to getting tech on a rail, or going up a rail, but we all know when something’s not quite there. I’d say the two “realest” would be the crooked grind [up the stretched stairs] and the one at the end of my Stay Gold part.

What else stands out about those Stay Gold days? I feel like that video signified the end an era for brands making those “blockbuster” full-length videos.

It was a lot of hard work on a level of wanting to deserve the position you’re in. Jon Miner, I reflect on it now and I thought he was hard to work with but it’s not that. When I was younger I probably perceived certain things, like, “Dang, this dude wants me to do it again?” Now, I think of it as wanting the best for me. Everyone who worked for Emerica wanted the best for Stay Gold and the best for you. It was hard work in that sense but that hard work was also the best because I was working with people like Miner, Justin Reagan, Jeff Henderson, Andrew Reynolds, Brandon Westgate, Marquise Preston and fuckin’ Heath Kirchart. Everything about it was awesome but anything that’s truly worth a damn is a little hard, you know?