UPDATE: Timmy Knuth is the new Free Flow Tour Skate Park champ. He beat out CJ Dixon and Alex Longcamp for it. I was also super impressed by Ryan Thompson, Cody Davis, and Tyson Bowerbank. Great contest! Watch for Timmy Knuth next month in Orlando: His Free Flow Tour win gives him wildcard entry to Prelims at the PlayStation Pro. The same deal a year ago has worked out pretty well for Chaz Ortiz.

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I'm in Salt Lake City for the 4th stop of the Dew Tour and the Free Flow Tour Finals, which go down tomorrow and Sunday. I'm stoked: In the last three years, the Free Flow Tour has helped introduce the world to skaters David Loy and Chaz Ortiz, and also to BMX sensation Mike Spinner. I wonder if the folks who started it had any idea it would be as awesome as it has ended up being?

I'm bummed to see that Ben Hatchell, an old friend from the days of the Vans Skatepark in Woodbridge, VA, has scratched out: He won the FFT vert contest last year and took 4th in the Park contest, and he was qualified to skate both again this time around. Quick, put your heads together: Is there anybody else in amateur skateboarding holding his own in park/pool/street/vert? We'll miss you this weekend, Ben.

On the vert ramp, that leaves a pretty epic battle between Zack Miller, son of vert/concrete legend Chris Miller, and Dylan Taylor, whippersnapper brother of Adam Taylor, the 18 year-old currently holding down the #5 spot overall on the Dew Tour, behind Bucky Lasek, Bob Burnquist, Pierre-Luc Gagnon, and Andy Macdonald, most of them nearly twice his age. There are some other guys in the FFT vert contest too, but I must confess to not knowing a lot about them: Full report after the contest, but the list includes Miller, Taylor, Joey Hamlisch, Brian Kucharski, Chris O'Reilly, Zack Deraad, Jordan Price, and Paul Luc Ronchetti. 

The Skate Park contest looks like a good one, too: There are 4 heats of 6 skaters in Round 1, and the list includes  Timmy Knuth, Ryan Thompson, Mark Nicholson, Joey Dillon, Taylor Bray, Clayton Lane, Taylor Smith, DJ Fort, CJ Dixon, Nick Matthews, Jack Olsen, Connor Ose, Cody Davis, Chase Webb, Dan Narloch, Andrew Gary, Liam McCabe, Alex Longchamp, Tyson Bowerbank, Anthony Estrada, Brandon Strosser, and Reed Levine. I'm not going to pretend I know all of those guys, but there are a lot of familiar names in there and it points to an interesting phenomenon: A lot of these am skaters are finding their way to an awful lot of contests these days. I think the Free Flow Tour was probably originally envisioned as a series of regional contests building to the big national Finals, so that, for example, the kid who won the Denver contest would actually be from Denver, but the reality is that these kids are traveling from all over the place to get to these contests, and many of them are skating at multiple stops along the tour trying to make the cut. Curious.

If I had to pick one name from the list that stands out, it's Tyson Bowerbank. He's one of the Osiris kids, hand-picked by Tony Magnusson, who, let's not forget, also gets credit for spotting Danny Way back when he was about Tyson's age.

One of these kids is going to win this thing and get to go skate with the pros next month in Orlando. Anybody care to hazard a guess before the contest goes down? Who's gonna be the next Chaz Ortiz?