Alan Gelfand
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Alan Gelfand (born 1963, New York) is the inventor of the ollie, a skateboarding move.
He was born in 1963 in New York and moved to Florida with his family in 1968. Alan Gelfand started skateboarding in 1974 after his father bought him his first skateboard. Already in 1976 he won the South Florida Skateboard Championships. In 1978, shortly after joining the legendary Powell Peralta Bones Brigade team, Gelfand invented the "no hands aerial" which his friends named after his nickname "ollie". Most skateboard tricks are now based on this maneuver. Like many other vert skaters of his time Alan quit skateboarding because of knee injuries in 1981. In 1986 Gelfand started racing cars and on the same year he won the Grand National Champion in go-carts. He now owns a Volkswagen dealership called "Volkswagen Depot" in Hollywood, Florida.
External links
- Alan Gelfand's Homepage (http://www.ollieair.com/)
- Volkswagen Depot (http://www.vwdepot.com/)