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# Blood, sweat, and air
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/blood-sweat-and-air/
- Published: 2002-06-27T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T00:23:48.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Entertainment, Venice, #archive-import

*Freestyle BMX draws thousands to the beach*

*By JESSE HALEY Special to the Daily Press*

Nearly 110,000 people swarmed the Venice Beach boardwalk this weekend to attend the Core Tour and Music Festival, an action sports competition with live bands and DJs.

The Core Tour showcased skateboard, in-line skate, mountainboard and freestyle BMX competitions with both open amateur and professional divisions.

The big show, the “King of Dirt” pro division series, drew the loudest, wildest crowd of the weekend. Fans packed bleachers and spilled out onto the grass. They pushed in against the sponsor bannered safety fence around the triple set of six-foot tall, hand-and shovel-sculpted kickers and landings.

Spectators of all ages were treated to the stunts, stylings and antics, the most fearless riders, the biggest tricks and the hairiest crashes freestyle BMX has to offer.

First place finisher Cory “Nasty” Nastazio charged through aerial sets with vicious proficiency. He made the most difficult freestyle tricks look routine — a backflip X-up, a fully extended superman seat grab and he pulled off a perfect 360-degree tail whip, a trick rider Greg Andrioli attempted twice but couldn’t land.

The roster of pro riders also included Joe Marks, Shaun Butler, Josh Pile, Eric Lawson, and England’s Stephen Murray, a gold medalist in both the X-Games and Gravity Games.

Nastazio finished first by a narrow margin over Marks while Murray took third.

Saturday’s amateur King of Dirt should have belonged to Joel Hulsey, an aggressive young rider from Santa Rosa. Hulsey laid down huge, squeaky clean backflips and tailwhips during the qualifying round but that didn’t save him when he came up short in the finals, crashing on three of four final runs. He dropped into fifth.

“He’s awesome. If he sticks with it, who knows,” said pro rider Andrioli who took highest honors in Sunday’s Big Air Challenge.

The field of riders was down to two when the height ribbon was elevated to 19 feet, four inches tall. Josh Pile took the first run but tore the ribbon when his back tire dipped mid-air.

Andrioli, a rookie pro from Las Vegas and a Core Tour first timer, bombed the drop in, hit the kicker and soared over the height mark, landing easily to take the gold and a $2,000 purse. Nastazio charged the course to throw a big-brotherly bear hug around Andrioli’s dirt dusted shoulders, lifting him to bathe in riotous applause.

The existing Venice Beach skate park was the platform for the street course, though course designers added launch ramps, quarter pipes, picnic tables, rails, and boxes.

Sam Fogarty out-tricked the competition to earn first in the In-line Street competition while Jason Stinsman double backflipped his way into first in the Big Kicker, a three-story drop in to a launch ramp. Fogarty took second in the Big Kicker.

Vanessa Torres showed why she deserves the reputation of one of the top female pro skateboarders by winning Sunday’s All Girl Skate Jam. Anna Gualt and Morgan Duey won the Grom and Intermediate divisions respectively.

The Core tour is a three-part series with upcoming events at South Street Seaport in New York City and Huntington Beach, Calif.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/9f/559f9abc-8372-4a2e-8c2d-27386da4e363/content/images/2026/10/062702-12_02.jpg)

to the Daily Press Josh Pile reels in a tailwhip during the King of Dirt competition. (Photo: Jesse Haley/Special)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 27, 2002.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/062702.pdf?ref=smdp.com)