Swedish Ali Boulala broke through with noise and bang in the international skateboarding world in the mid-1990s.
Together with his team, he embarked on a ten-year world tour filled with skateboarding, fame and boundless partying.
But both life and career were turned upside down on March 7, 2007 in Melbourne, Australia.
After a night of partying, Ali Boulala and his friend Shane Cross were involved in a tragic motorcycle accident. The accident was serious and resulted in the death of Cross while Boulala ended up in a coma for four months.
— I’m lying there in the hospital and I don’t understand why I’m lying there. I don’t know how many times it was entered that I had been in an accident, then the next time I woke up I had forgotten it, says Boulala in the documentary “The Scars of Ali Boulala”.
After he woke up from the coma, Boulala was sentenced to four years in prison for negligence in traffic and causing the death of another. He was also deported, from Australia, to Sweden.
— The first thing I thought was: I should have died instead of him, everything would have been so much better then. But that was not the case. I was left as some damn punishment.