Tom comes from Flensburg and I already knew him from a few contests in northern Germany. However, we never met in person. His store sponsor “Caramba Skateshop” suggested that I take Tom into the team as a morphine “store team rider”. The idea was that the store could sell morphine better in the region. In return, the Caramba Shop would order more morphine products. I thought it was a good idea and went for it. As a deal, Tom was to get his boards at the production price and all the textiles for free.

So Tom often came from Flensburg to Hamburg, where we went skating together and got to know each other better. At some point, Tom also met his current wife in Hamburg, which is why he often visits Hamburg. It didn’t take long for him to move from Flensburg to Hamburg into his current wife’s apartment. Tom was now firmly established in Hamburg and we regularly went skating and partying and became good friends.

Until then, Tom was “only” the store team rider, but I thought that was kind of stupid, so I gave him official team rider status without further ado. Since then, he’s the one I’ve been traveling with the most. Conversely, he is involved everywhere where morphine is concerned. At 39 years old, it’s incredible how he can still push himself so hard and dominate the Morphium Instagram channel with the number of clips he regularly puts out. Although he is now a father, he doesn’t miss out on skating.

In principle, he’s also the one who motivates me to skate the most. He doesn’t let up, for which I am very grateful. He tattooed the morphine logo on his forearm a few years ago. This loyalty to a brand cannot be topped. He also regularly supplies his skate crew in Eimsbüttel with morphine decks and makes sure that this is adhered to. As there is no store in Hamburg that sells Morphium, he contributes a lot to the preservation of the brand by selling the boards in addition to skating. Of course, I hope that this will continue for a long time to come and I’m glad to have someone like Tom in the team.

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.