Seconds before 20:28 on August 12, Danny León starts rolling with his skateboard across the Aragonese plateau. Although he had been doing tricks for 10 minutes while the eclipse progressed, the two-time Olympian and one of the few Spaniards with his own board model knows he has 30 seconds to capture the dream image: “I wanted the complete ring,” he says about his video, which became a historic image of the eclipse that mesmerized half of Spain.
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On the third attempt, and with the time window nearly running out, he achieves the “perfect trick”: Him, his board, the ramp, and the moon completely hiding the sun.
To reach that iconic image, you have to go back more than a year. Danny and Jaicano, a photographer, spent hours taking photos with the moon and the sun. Shortly after, Gochi Estrella, the cameraman who works with the skater and who knew there would be an eclipse in Spain, said the typical phrase that turns a crazy idea into a common goal for Danny and his team. “What if we do something that day?”.
That “something” began to take shape when Jaicano, “quite a geek about these things,” according to León, found a location. Together with Estrella, he visited it to confirm it was the perfect spot. The chosen town, Novales, 15 kilometers from Huesca.
The next step was to look for sponsors for a project that involved a small team of eight people, from the cameramen to those responsible for creating the ad hoc structure to make everything perfect. “No brand supported us,” he admits. Far from backing down, he decided to move forward: “We wanted to do it anyway”.
A plural that is not just a formality. It is recognition of the work of a team that wanted to carry the project forward no matter the cost. Despite the difficulties, the result turned out perfectly. “Everything was possible thanks to each person’s contribution, with no help at all, sleeping in the car, in the dark field, eating Mercadona omelets… it was brutal,” he sums up still buzzing.
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In that team were Sergi and Quique from SBRamps, a company specialized in creating ramps for skaters like the one the Madrid native used in the video. Their company was responsible for creating the walkway, brought from Barcelona, so Danny “could fly and do the trick with the skate”.
After locating the landowner to get permission to clear it of stones and obstacles, they installed the ramp and the wooden path Danny would use to gain speed the day before the eclipse.
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Twenty-four hours before the Moon hid the king star, Danny was rehearsing and the rest were doing photography and video tests. “They were 500 meters away,” he points out. A Whatsapp video call was the link between the skater, the ramp guys, and Gochi, Ana Amor, Antonio, and Rafa Black, in charge of the audiovisual part.
Some spotlights behind the walkway helped outline the structure and Danny, both wrapped in the darkness of the eclipse. The outfit was the final touch. “I always wear white, it’s one of my trademarks,” he recalls. On D-day, with some fear that the weather would ruin the work, the team was in their positions, ready to try something that seemed like a chimera.
“I tried seven or eight different tricks before the eclipse, but at the moment of the ring we had time for three,” he recalls. Under normal circumstances, he would have done two. Thanks to the creators of the structure, who pushed him with a rope to gain speed, he reached that trio of maneuvers. “They had to hide after pulling the rope,” he recalls.
The tricks were not without difficulties, both on his part, with problems like “wind, low visibility, stones…”, and from the audiovisual team, who had to work “very fast to set the camera parameters” to get it right. “Many things could have gone wrong,” he adds.
The result, a “difficult and spectacular” trick that reached the limit. “It’s exactly the one from the video moment, where you see a ring of fire,” he says.
When they saw the result, they knew it was special, but not that it would reach the heights it has, with a unanimous verdict: it is one of the images. “We knew it could reach a million views, but it’s been crazy”.
Danny and his team are still absorbing the high of a historic day. “It’s the most different thing I’ve done in my career, there were more chances it would go wrong than right, but it went perfect.” Zoeh, the dog who accompanies Danny to championships and who goes up with him on the podium, was not missing either: “Skateboarding and my dog are my pillars and my motivation”.
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