Daryl Dominguez – Pissing Grounds

Mr Domingo… There’s a lot to be said about Daryl, but first I’ve got to throw it back for all the people that have been skating since the Noughties… You will undoubtedly remember his extreme Yo tre flips or body twisting hard flips (it was a different time and this stuff was fully on trend). I knew of Daryl way before I actually knew Daryl and the idea that preceded him was ‘this little bastard is gnarly; he’s got a death wish!’ He’s comfortable throwing a trick that he can’t really do on flat across some ridiculously lengthy gap or down some huge set of stairs that makes my ankles recoil just thinking about it, on reflection, I guess he’s always just been going 110.
Since then his skating has developed a lot in terms of approach, he still puts his body in compromising situations but it’s usually to land into some tight as fuck bank, not just hucking down a double set. Aside from skating, what needs to be mentioned about Daryl is his infectious positivity. When you’re travelling things can change really quickly and it’s easy to feel like the situation is turning sour or it’s time to return home. Never with Daryl, anything is possible; doors are constantly opening because people want to be around this little ball of energy. We often attribute these doors to skateboarding and it’s true that this wondrous activity has connected us all to people around the world, but you also have to be a good person, a personality that others gravitate towards and that’s definitely Double D! Love you bro, keep on keeping on… –Tom Delion

Interview by Will Harmon

First things first, I see you write this on Insta all the time, what is ‘110’?
Daryl Dominguez: It’s a phrase that was coined… It kinda has roots from my friend Aaron Wilmot and his crew in Scotland. Basically it means 110 per cent. Just ‘110’ makes it sound a bit more casual and punchy. We went on that Nepal trip a couple of years ago and it kind of became this phrase… So like if you’re trying a trick just be like, ‘fuck it, this go, 110!’

You wrote a quite insightful article about that Nepal trip in Free (issue 22) and I know you’ve been doing a lot of outreach and charity work for Nepalese skaters… What got you interested in doing this and have you ever done anything like this before?
It was my first dabble, but it’s also how Skate Nepal started. It started from when I first travelled to Nepal with a couple friends and I met the person building the skatepark there and I just wanted to help. I wanted to extend it and get kids hyped on it. I did a lesson the first time I went there and loads of these kids that had never skated before turned up so I saw the need for something kind of like that culturally there for a lot of kids to want to do something. There was a lot of energy there so I figured it would be really good to build a proper skatepark and get a good infrastructure going. So when I came back, I didn’t even know Tom (Delion) or Gaurab (Thakali) at this point, but they had been in Nepal two weeks before me so we chatted about the whole experience and we all just wanted to do the same thing: help. So we figured at first the best way to do that was to start a charity, but then it made more sense to start a non-profit, so that’s kind of how it was born. And it’s sort of led on to beautiful other things.

Drop-in, then ollie, London. Ph. Reece Leung

And so how many times have you been back to Nepal since that first time with your mates? 
I’ve been back three times. I was going back there every year for at least a month.

Tom Delion was telling me that when you guys were together there people would constantly walk up to you and start talking Nepalese. They thought you were Tom’s guide or something…
Yeah obviously because of my complexion and the way I look… I basically blend in in most countries in Southeast Asia. So it’s not just Nepal where I get that, I get that everywhere: Thailand, Vietnam, etc. It’s really funny because there’s a lot of perks to that. A lot of the time when I visit a temple or something like that I never have to pay the tourist price. I’ve always walked in and acted local. And I have a drama degree as well so it’s an excuse to use it. But generally it can be quite weird as I travel a lot on my own as well. In Asia, when you’re trying to communicate to someone in English, they think it’s a degrading thing. They think if you speak to them in English you’re asserting some sort of power over them or something.

Obviously you’re not. Is English the only language you know? 
It is. My parents never taught me Filipino growing up. My older sister had a hard time with it because she was in-between two languages so she found it really hard to express herself. She would cry a lot, so with my parents and me I think they didn’t really push me to learn it.

So your parents moved here from the Philippines? 
Yes.

Double-D. Ph. Rafal Wojnowski

But you were born here (in the UK)?
Yeah. My sister was born here too but she would go back and forth to the Philippines quite a lot in the first four years of her life because my mum was here way before my dad. They had a long distance thing for a long time, until my dad got the right papers. Then he moved here and my sister was born and I came nine years later.

And you grew up in west London right? 
Yeah I grew up in Harrow and so I grew up skating Harrow Skatepark, so I was used to cutting myself up pretty early. (Editor’s note: Harrow Skatepark is known for how rough and crusty it is.) So that’s where I grew up and where I went to school and I didn’t really get out of Harrow until I went to uni. And that’s when I was like 19 or 20.

I think the last time I interviewed you was when you were in uni and studying acting.
Yeah that’s right! I did a modern drama studies course.

So nine years later, how often do you use your acting skills and what you studied? Is it just when you’re in Southeast Asia acting like a local? Ha ha…
Yeah… Nah… Not in a sense where I’ve needed it on my CV to get a job… To be fair the only time where it was applicable was when I first moved to Australia. When I moved to Melbourne I got a job working in a theatre, basically building sets, and having that theatre experience helped.

I think anyone familiar with you knows you travel quite a lot. You have footage everywhere. 
I’ve carved out a name for myself ha ha…

Gap to board slide, London. Ph. Rafal Wojnowski

Nick Richards (who filmed and edited this new part) told me he was the first to bring you to Southeast Asia to skate, is that right? 
Yeah that’s true; he actually was. Before that the only time I had been to Asia was for family stuff to the Philippines. I was very grounded in England until I finished uni. I graduated in 2013 so I had already dreamed about travelling with my girlfriend and we had saved money, just wanting to travel the world. But then I got hit up to go on this Red Bull trip to Thailand. They had wanted Chris Oliver, but he couldn’t go, so they asked me. Obviously my girlfriend was a bit jealous, as Thailand was one of the places we wanted to visit, but anyways I flew there on my 23rd birthday and Nick picked me up from the airport. He was living in Thailand at the time and was the one who organised the whole trip in 2014. It was a good crew: Clint Peterson, Justin Strubing, myself and Dylan Hughes. And so I think Red Bull must have liked what we put out from that trip because a year later Nick had moved to Vietnam and we basically did the same trip again to there. So those were my first two times skating in Asia and those trips got me hooked.

Hooked on travelling or more specifically hooked on travelling to Asia? 
There was something about Asia… Something about that first time I was in Thailand that really resonated with me. I think culturally the way people are, their mannerisms, and their level of respect for people in general really sort of hit home. I’d already read a lot about Tibetan Buddhism and then seeing Buddhism in action at temples…

Are you religious?
I wouldn’t consider myself religious, but just the ethos behind what that (Buddhism) can teach is very wholesome and I think it’s very universal in its value. Regardless of your background or your religious, spiritual or political views you can benefit from it.

Kickflip to fakie, London. Ph. James Griffiths

So you’ve gone back to Asia every year since 2014 right?
Yeah every year except this year because of Covid. And at the end of 2015 that’s when me and my ex finally did that big trip. When I got back, I was still in touch with Nick, and he had moved to London but we both discussed how we wanted to go back to Thailand again…

The Mango smoothies, Pad Thai…
Yeah and The Pad See Ews… We just wanted to be back there again because we had such good times there. So this is 2016 and I had just started Skate Nepal, and I went back there after we’d fundraised a bunch of money. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had this money, I started this organisation and I was going there to figure out what to do. I didn’t know anyone that built skateparks, it was just a completely on the whim trip, but then loads of coincidental stuff happened. That’s when I bumped into the Make Life Skate Life people that just so happened to be there in Nepal the same time I was. So we joined forces and got them in touch with the right people and that happened.
After that trip I broke up with that long-term girlfriend and then I was just completely free to do what I wanted. So then Nick hits me up and says, ‘I got this money, let’s go to Thailand…’ And I had this idea last time I was in Thailand that I kinda wanted to film all at night in Bangkok…

NocturnUp.
Yes.

Yeah I mean it’s so busy with people there in the day…
And it’s really hot too! So the way I was picturing it at the time was, you know in the intro of Stay Gold with the flashing lights and the slow shutter speed…

Yeah…
Yeah so we thought it would be really cool to do something with the lights of Bangkok and the city life and tie that in with skating. So it just so happened that that trip worked out, and Nick brought Dylan (Hughes) with him and we would just go filming at night, just sleeping all day…

Did you get any flack from the locals skating at night, like from people sleeping? 
Not really at all. There are good spots in Bangkok, but they’re not plaza-style. We found some good stuff there; some gritty, dirty spots and I always attribute it to growing up in London skating weird and crusty shit.

Well yeah it was a great idea for an edit and the Hong Kong one was sick as well. I know in 2017 you moved to Australia for a bit. With your immense love for Southeast Asia and the Southern Hemisphere what keeps you living in the UK?  
Yeah I’ve fully thought of just living over there and not coming back, but funnily enough I actually met an English girl when I was over there in Melbourne, well she’s not English, but she grew up in England, and then she moved back. And also it was becoming winter in Australia, I was only there for seven months, and I knew there was a lot of shit going on in Europe like HelRide, CPH Open and they’re all things I wanted to experience too, so that sort of cut my Melbourne trip short. So I flew back to London in June 2017. I moved in with that girl in Stoke Newington and I guess after the summer that’s when we started filming this part.

50-50, London. Ph. Rafal Wojnowski

Since you travel so much, I know you aren’t often in town and able to film for this part, but since March we’ve all been stuck here. You must have been able to really get a lot of clips recently right? 
Yeah, the position we’re all in, I’d like to think I used the circumstances auspiciously. And I feel like having the time to put aside to film it, not even in the aspect of just getting the clips, but even just the lifestyle of only committing myself to one thing… I’ve learnt a lot of lessons… Even that you can’t just put all your time into skating, there still needs to be a balance. You need something to take your mind away from it and explore other facets of life.

I think a lot of people reading this might realise that you’ve been sponsored for quite a while, but you’re not pro, so they may wonder how you make ends meet. Do you get paid to skate? 
I do get paid to skate. I guess for a normal person doing a normal job then I guess I don’t make much money, but at the same time I still work. I teach skate lessons and I work for King Ramps. Building ramps is seasonal so I’ll build in the spring and summer and in the winter it’s more admin, trying to get clients in. All those jobs are within skating and they’re all really rewarding for me, which is sick.

That’s the dream right there. 
Yeah so although I don’t earn a lot of money, doing that physically and having enough to survive is satisfying enough.

Dan Magee made some harsh comments about you in Harry Lintell’s Free interview. Do you want to address that? How did that make you feel?
So I hadn’t filmed anything for their video (Cover Version) and they wanted to have one trick from me and they wanted it to be the gnarliest thing they could think of and obviously I went to that spot a few times to try it and I didn’t come through. As a skater when you put that much time and effort into trying a trick and doing everything you can do to get it and you don’t, it’s already gutting enough, but then to be sort of attacked in an interview like that was a bit like: ultimate dick!
So I reckon Dan obviously didn’t want that to get published, that sincerity came across to me, but it was still something that came from somewhere so obviously that grinded me for a little bit. But there’s also a part of my personality where I can’t be asked to hold onto stuff like that. We chatted about it and it was cool, I was obviously quite pissed off… But I just felt like it was easier to just drop the whole thing, but he did actually apologise to me, and then he tried to give me some work on some corporate shit to make up for it. I can tell it sort of grinded him and that was enough for me to be like, ‘don’t worry about it man.’ Life’s too short to hold onto shit like that. That shit’s only gonna rot you away if you hold onto it. It’s totally cool and now we just still chat shit every time we see each other. It was shit I’m not gonna lie, but it was just one of those things you have to just work through.

Ok now something Nick just told me the other day, that I had no idea about, is that you’re on the Filipino Olympic team!? 
I prefer the term Filipino national team, because it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to the Olympics.

How did this happen?
In 2019 Anthony Claravall hit me up and told me that Myanmar were looking for a coach for their Olympic team. The money was pretty good and having worked in skateboarding and charity it was something that really interested me. So I applied for the job, and I’d already been to Myanmar and saw Ali Drummond there and I was chatting to him about it and he thought it would be really cool if I got it. It’s not like the China-style of Olympic training he told me, which by the way is fucked and I don’t agree with it at all. So that June I applied for it and I got an email that I had been shortlisted to the top two candidates. But in the end they gave the job to Kenny Reed. When I heard that I was like, ‘that’s sick; that makes so much sense.’ Because I already knew about his charity work in Palestine and I knew he would be the perfect guy for it.

Ollie, London. Ph. Rafal Wojnowski

He is the OG Traveller and a wonderful dude to boot. 
Yes indeed. So that fell through and then Ant hits me up again and was like, ‘how do you feel about riding for the Philippines?’ And I was like, ‘riding? Like skating?’ And then Ant came to town like a month later for SLS and he brought some Filipino skaters with him and then I went and talked to him about it. My whole angle was that I wanted to do what I do with the Nepal non-profit organisation stuff as a way to nurture skating in the Philippines. Globally skateboarding in the Philippines is a very nascent thing, so obviously I didn’t want the people there to only be exposed to the Olympic, banners and all that sort of style of skateboarding.

Yeah I see. 
If they’re just exposed to that style of skating they’re not gonna know any different. Obviously skateboarding for me and you and a lot of us is so culturally rich for what it does as a means to where you stand in society. There are things you can learn and grow from and community… How skateboarding is a vessel to nurture community and understand it and how important it is. So this is what I said to Ant, ‘this is what I want to do: get more skateparks built and introduce it on a different level.’ And Ant is kind of that guy too; he’s a well-respected dude in skateboarding. I mean if it wasn’t for him… I mean I got told to try out for the English team and I didn’t even reply to that email.

Well sounds like you can do so much more for the Philippines. 
Yeah. And I’ve now gotten a Filipino passport. That was one of the perks for me as well, for someone that probably doesn’t see myself living in London in the distant future, it’s good to have another option and especially for the Philippines where a lot of my heritage is. So they built this skatepark just for this Sea Games comp in the Philippines and they flew me there for my first official event with the team last December.

So do they pay you to be on the team? 
Yeah a little bit. I was meant to be gone again in February to Singapore for another NocturnUp and to the Philippines to open up a bank account there so I can get paid. If you work in government services or anything official you need to get a bank account there. It’s called a land bank. But because of Covid I didn’t go, but it’s helped me get a lot more footage for this part with Nick. I was supposed to go to Seoul and Puerto Rico too, but everything has been cancelled now.

So what do you have planned next with no travel? 
I’ve been on the road most of my adult life to an extent. So at the end of last year there was a part of me that was like, ‘fuck if this is all I know at the moment, I feel like I need some time to slow down.’ With stuff I’ve been learning about seasons and how they affect your mood and your energy levels and things like that I felt like I realised the purpose of a winter is to slow down and reflect on things.

And you’ve been escaping that winter for years now… 
Yeah I’ve burnt myself out in the past 4-5 years. So this winter I took time to process certain things and had time to slow down. Then lockdown happened and it was like an extension of that. Now I have all this energy to do all these projects that my heart is invested in, but I can’t fly anywhere. So I’m just trying to get that energy out here, study new stuff like nutrition and finish this part with Nick. The main thing I’ve learnt from the whole slowing down process is that I’ve constantly lived like I know what’s coming next, but this is the first real time that I don’t know. But what it has taught me to do is to appreciate what’s right there in front of you.