Trevor Thomas recalls, with only a little bit of pain, his run-in with a small sports car.

Rollerblading at breakneck speed down Newbury Street, Thomas as brought to a painfully abrupt halt when the door of a parked automobile swung suddenly open, placing a steel wall directly in his path. The 19-year old managed to escape massive injury by dragging one skate sideways behind him to slow down and breaking the inevitable crash with thrust-forward arms.

"That was pretty heinous," Thomas muses.

Thomas took three days off from skating to let his smashed wrists recover. Now he's back on his Rollerblades, dazzling the spectators that line Memorial Drive along the Charles River on sunny Sunday afternoons.

A 200-yard section of the street is given over every Sunday to a complicated obstacle course of traffic cones. At one end of this maze lies the showpiece, a three foot high wooden ramp. Trevor occasionally soars off this slanted plane, putting up to seven feet of air between himself and the ramp.

Zigzagging through all of this are dozens of skaters, some novices out for a Sunday challenge , others, like Thomas, sporting a bright yellow "Team Wiley" T-shirt. "Don't try this at home," the shirts' logos appropriately warn.

Team Wiley is the creation of Sharon B. Weil. Weil worked for Rollerblade until six months ago, when she quit and decided to start a team to give exhibitions and compete with other squads. She started scouting at Boston's Esplanade for talented skaters, and later held auditions to find the skaters with the most flair and skill.

Surprisingly, many of the best skaters were newcomers. Thomas bought his first pair of blades eight months ago when he totaled his motorcycle ("I had no other way to get around," he explains), and 15-year-old Chuck J. Mello, the team's youngest member, learned to skate just five months ago.

In this short time, these skaters have developed an improvisational, fresh style.

"We do freestyle, street-style, crazy, stupid, stuff," Weil says. "It's a ball."

The skaters dart backwards and forwards along the river, effortlessly combining powerful speed and delicate, intricate footwork. Members of the team lock arms and glide through the cones in a line, periodically unlatching and reassembling. The swaying motion is almost hypnotic.

People are more than willing to pay for this entertainment, and the team has been booked for Boston's Fourth of July Celebration, where Weil says more than half a million people are expected. For the highlight of that show, Thomas will jump off the ramp and sail over a Honda Civic.

It's not all glitzy moves, though. Rollerblading has its less pleasant side, as most of the Sunday skaters can attest. Thomas' type of accident is a common occurrence for almost any frequent skater.

Weil "took a major dive" last summer and bruised her spine. Mello wears a jagged scar on his neck obtained recently when he skated through a clothes line in a nearby alley. Victor Luke, 28, sports, wounds on both elbows and knees in various stages of healing.

And Nancy McGinty, a recreational skater who sometimes watches the riverside displays, badly bruised her knee when she fell on her icy driveway, and was sore for four months. Now she wears knee pads. Watching the skaters' hot-shot antics, she shakes her head in amazement.