Lots of people in the southeast have been trying to make the most of the short summer season but Oxbow native Dylan Miller has made it into a lifestyle.
Miller is a wakeboarding sensation in Florida and ESPN will show a video of his for their ‘World of X-Games’ broadcast Sept. 16. Fans will vote on either his or five other competitors after it goes online.
“It’s just going to be a competition showcasing people’s wakeboarding,” said Miller from his Florida home. “If you’re ever seen videos with skateboarding or snowboarding or anything like that online, that’s kind of how people make a living: showing their riding and putting video content to showcase the stuff they can do.”
Wakeboarding developed out of water skiing and is similar to surfing or snowboarding and involves a long, rectangular board on which a rider will perform moves, depending on their speed and the wakes of the boat pulling them.
Every year for the last four years X-Games have been putting on contests for wakeboarding, motocross, BMX and other disciplines and Miller has been selected with Trevor Bashir. Fan votes determine the winner.
“We’re given two and a half to three months to film a video and then deliver it to them, and then it’ll be a featured on ESPN,” Miller said.
He began his wakeboarding here in the southeast near Oxbow and the Alameda Dam.
“In Estevan, I used to ride a lot on the Boundary Dam, because of the warmer water temperatures,” he said. “I started riding behind a boat mostly, and that’s what I did for the first ten years I wakeboarded. Now I spend most of my year in Florida.”
There are a lot of different aspects developing in wakeboarding, like cable riding, which is says is like a chair lift for snowboarding or skiing.
“Instead of going up it runs in a circle,” he said. “They put different obstacles like different rails or jumps in a cable park. It’s been around for about 15-20 years and they’re just starting to get popular here in the last eight or nine years.”
For his video, he wanted to perform a bit of every kind of riding, the newest of which is called ‘winching’.
“It’s similar to if someone has a four by four truck with a winch on the end of it, and it’s the same idea but we just use a thin light rope and the winch operates at a different speed than the truck,” he said. “You can just put some stakes into the ground and you can just find any body of water and wakeboard across it.”
Miller is a bit of a rare duck in the wakeboarding community in that he’s from land locked Saskatchewan without huge lakes available year round.
“I think the main reason behind it is that people think it would be a big disadvantage having such a short summer,” Miller said. “But I feel that really motivates us to utilize the short summer that we have. Especially when I would spend my winters down in Florida, the guys who were down in Florida wouldn’t really have much time… as much as I did. I was used to having such a short summer.
“When I’d come down here, I’d just wakeboard as much as possible. I liked it from the first time I tries it and I stuck with it.”
Miller was happy to be chosen for the Real Wake competition.
“There’s probably been around 15-20 athletes that have been chosen (over its history) so it’s a pretty prestigious thing to be chosen to take part,” he said. “Really it’s like the biggest stage for wakeboarding. I’m just really happy to be a part of it.”
