Tom Penny | Skater Archives

Who’s Andrew Reynolds favorite skater? Answer: Tom Penny? But why?

I think I can take a stab at this. If you watch Tom skate, he has THE effortless style. There’s no strain, stiffness, in his stance. He flips his tricks like he’s just f*ckin around, but still lands them.

The Disappearance Myth

Decades ago, there was a myth circulating that Tom disappeared. No one had seen him in months. No ads, no video snippets, just radio silence.

Some thought it was drugs. Others thought he went to a Buddhist monastery high in the Himalayas. Thanks to the video Flip Sorry, Geoff Rowley dispelled the myth once and for all: Tom found a home in France, built the sickest mini-ramp ever, and just skated and read books every day.

The Day At The Bank With A Chain

There’s a famous story where Tom Penny went to skate a bank. Now at the top of the bank was two poles with a chain connecting both of the poles. Tom started to do tricks over the chain into the bank. He basically rattled off every trick in the book to where no one would ever bother trying to get tricks there again. Here’s a list of some of the tricks done at the chain bank:

Frontside Flip

Switch Flip
Nollie Backside Flip
Switch Ollie

Nollie 360
Caballerial
Switch Frontside Flip

Hippie Jump
Nollie
Switch Backside Flip

You can watch the these tricks in the first video listed below (Transworld ‘Anthology’):

The Frontside Flip Into Tranny

I think it’s in the Menikmati video, Tom frontside flips into an indoor skate park mini ramp. That’s the trick that blows everyone’s mind to this day. Maybe because dropping into ramps is sketchy enough for most people, so to do a flip trick into tranny seems pretty insane. But if you watch Tom enough you can see how it’s natural for him to do something like that.