By Anakin Curtis
Many students make use of their longboards to get across campus quickly. When fourth-year BSc (Geoinformatics) student Joshua van Coller is not snaking down Victoria Street between classes, he is going 80 km/h down any hill he and his crew, Zamalek Media, can find.
Zamalek Media is a downhill skating collective formed and filmed by Van Coller and b-roll specialist Mathew Paine. The rest of the group consists of skaters Tanner Dewrance, Matthew de Lange, Sean Grobbelaar, Matthew Cutten and Morgan Petersen.
On their Instagram and YouTube pages, Zamalek Media showcase their exhilarating, and at times nail-biting, runs down the scenic hillside roads in various places around Cape Town. Their most recent outing followed skaters down the picturesque, albeit rainy, hills of Llandudno, near Hout Bay. Every year when the Cape Cycle Tour takes place, the downhill skating community takes advantage of the closed roads to host the event known as Llandslide.
The road has taken some damage in the years since the first event, but this does not easily deter Zamalek Media from getting the perfect run. Considering these conditions, Van Coller stated, “It’s not prime skating, but it makes it sketchy and fun.”
Van Coller aims to keep Zamalek Media as inclusive as possible in order to open doors for people who have not had the chance to showcase their skill and see themselves on film. He further described the overall mission of Zamalek Media and said, “I started [Zamalek Media] because I wanted to tape people that are extremely good [at skating] for people that never get the opportunity to see it themselves.”
With this, Van Coller extends an invitation to any skater keen to film their runs down the hills of Stellenbosch to join him on his mission. Find Zamalek Media on YouTube and Instagram (@zamalek__media).
