I met Jan at the same time as Roman. The two were skate buddies back then and inseparable. The first contact was made at the first Papenburg contests and East Frisian Skate Cups. I really got to know Jan in 2005 on the Morphium Mallorca Tour, where he came along as a guest. On the one hand he was relatively calm and reserved, but in some situations he came out of his shell and wanted to know his limits. I experienced this personally on Mallorca when he wanted to wrestle with me and ended up in the pool as a result.
As a person, he was always very nice and sociable, so it was clear that he was included on the next tours and was there accordingly.

His great misfortune as a skater back then was that he kept breaking his decks. As a student, of course, he didn’t have that much money and therefore mostly skated with blank decks and always carried a spare deck with him. His favorite tricks back then were hardflips, f-flips and ollies from garage roofs.

He trained as a graphic designer and helped me with graphic designs for Morphium from 2008 onwards, until I started working with him regularly and he took over the complete graphic design of ads, flyers, stickers, logo decks, T-shirts, etc.

As a double pack with Roman, Jan often came to Hamburg to visit and got to know various Hamburg skateboard locals through skating. It was therefore not surprising that he wanted to start studying communication design in Hamburg after his apprenticeship. As my flatmate at the time had moved out, Jan moved into my apartment in Hamburg and we formed a shared flat. As a result, communication was even better and we were able to work well together.

After a while, Jan asked me whether it would be possible for him to officially join the team as well, as he would then feel more pushed and he was already consistently pressing Morphium through our collaboration anyway. I didn’t mind and Jan was another team rider for Morphium Skateboards. To this day, nothing has changed and I am glad to have him at my side, as Morphium would not be able to present the current standard of quality without him. At least not without spending a lot of money and hiring an agency for the graphic design services. I also know that he is 100% behind Morphium and that I can rely on him 100% as a team rider and also as a friend. I hope that this will continue for a long time to come.

We also thought that we could open up the skateboard market in Groningen and the Netherlands through Klaas van der Laan. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, even though he was riding for the biggest skateboard distributor in the Netherlands at the time.

So he had been selling morphine stuff among his colleagues and friends on his own for a long time.

Towards 2006 he withdrew from skating and told me honestly that as a sponsored skater he could no longer perform as well as he thought he should. They parted ways and shortly afterwards he and a few friends tried to set up a skateboard company called “Broken Skateboards”, which unfortunately no longer exists.