Grounded

Grounded is a full-length BMX video released by the footwear company etnies in 2007, five years after the brand's first BMX video, Forward. It was filmed by Stew Johnson, Marco Svizzero and Mike Manzoori, edited by Manzoori, and features the etnies BMX team of the period across park, street and trails, with Ruben Alcantara's closing section the best-known part. Grounded is notable both for its riding and for what it represented: a shoe company, rather than a bike brand or magazine, producing a full BMX video with a budget to match.

Background

Through the 2000s, footwear brands became some of the biggest sponsors in BMX. They had learned from skateboarding that a strong team and a well-made video sold shoes, and they brought those budgets to BMX. etnies, part of the Sole Technology group, had assembled a BMX team that mixed riders from different disciplines and countries.

etnies had already made one BMX video, Forward, released in 2002. Ruben Alcantara's part in it had started to make his name beyond Europe. Grounded was the follow-up, and it took the model of the skateboarding shoe company video, where team videos were among the most anticipated releases of any year, further in BMX.

The filming was shared between Stew Johnson, the filmer behind Anthem, Marco Svizzero and Mike Manzoori, who also edited the video. Grounded was released on DVD in 2007, at a time when the full-length video was still the main way a rider's best footage reached the public.

Contents and sections

Grounded follows the full-length structure of the time: a series of rider sections cut to music, with Ruben Alcantara's section closing the video. The riders include Alcantara, Aaron Ross, Brian Kachinsky, Taj Mihelich, Morgan Wade, Joe Rich, Sandy Carson, Jamie Bestwick, Adam Baker, Josh Stricker, Garrett Byrnes, Sergio Layos, Brett Walker and Kurtis Elwell.

The riding covers the range of the team. Transition riding in concrete parks and on ramps, street riding on rails and ledges, and dirt riding at trails all appear. Compared with street-focused videos from earlier in the decade, such as Animal's Can I Eat? (2004), Grounded is broad, reflecting a team that mixed street, trails, park and vert riders.

The video has the finish that a footwear budget allowed, with steady filming and clean editing throughout.

Standout parts

Ruben Alcantara's section is the reason Grounded is still watched. Alcantara, from Malaga in Spain, rides transition and street in a way that was unusual at the time and remains distinctive: carving walls and banks, using coping and hips as part of a line rather than as single obstacles, and treating street spots the way a park rider treats a bowl. His Grounded section, which closes the video, together with his part in etnies' earlier video Forward, is the main record of his riding at its peak, and it influenced many riders who grew up on those two videos.

Beyond Alcantara, the video is remembered for its overall quality rather than for a single trick. The size of the team and the range of terrain make it a useful snapshot of what top-level riding looked like across disciplines in the mid 2000s.

Impact and legacy

Following Forward, Grounded showed that footwear brands could make BMX videos that stood alongside the best from bike companies and magazines. It was followed a year later by Nike 6.0's Writing on the Wall (2008), another BMX video from a footwear brand.

For Ruben Alcantara, Grounded was one of the two sections that fixed his reputation. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential riders in BMX history, and this video is a large part of the evidence.

The video also belongs to a particular moment. Within a few years, the full-length DVD would give way to the web edit, and the kind of large team project that Grounded represents became rare. See the web edit era for how that change happened.

Related

• Ruben Alcantara
• Joe Rich and Jamie Bestwick
• Writing on the Wall: Nike 6.0's BMX video from the following year
• Park, street and trails
• Transition, coping and hip