When professional mountain biker Darren “The Claw” Berrecloth peered down at the maze of perilous jumps and stunts lying between him and the sea of people in Whistler, British Columbia’s Village Square during the CrankWorx Freeride Mountain Bike Festival last August, he saw the 12,000 spectators, the army of cameramen and the big screen at the bottom. But the biggest pressure didn’t come from the crowds.

Head rush: Young gun Cam McCaul, 19, surveys the crowd at Whistler’s CrankWorx Freeride Mountain Bike Festival. Photo by Blake Jargenson

Berrecloth, 23, is the reigning king and local Canadian favorite of this newly emerging and wildly popular slopestyle scene, but American teenage mountain bike phenoms Paul Basagoitia, Cameron Zink and Kyle Strait—whose pantheon of tricks include one-footed back flips, tail whips off 20-foot-high ramps and superman seat grabs over huge gap jumps—are testing his dominance. Basagoitia ended up beating Berrecloth at CrankWorx, and the competition will only get tougher. Multinational companies like Red Bull, Oakley, Siemens and Nissan are sponsoring slopestyle events all over the world that attract major-sport-sized crowds (the Red Bull District Ride, a slopestyle competition in Nuremberg, Germany, attracted more than 40,000 spectators last September), and many in the mountain bike industry are looking to the genre as the sport’s ticket to non-endemic sponsorships and big network TV coverage.

“Slopestyle competitions triple our marketability,” says Berrecloth. “They expose what we do to way more demographics than before. Now people know who you are and what you do. Mountain biking is turning into a mainstream sport right before our eyes.”

That’s not to say the sport is selling out. The new slopestyle paradigm may be mainstream, but it’s rooted in core biking. “We loved the slopestyle concept before it really caught on,” says Jamie Simon, sports marketing manager with Red Bull. “It showcases the skills of today’s rider more than a lot of the other competitions; it’s everything that mountain biking is, from BMX right through to downhill.”

And prime-time audiences are ready to tune in. — Mitchell Scott

Join the slopestyle masses at the next CrankWorx festival, August 2–6, 2006 in Whistler, BC. www.crankworx.com

Last Updated: Apr 10th, 2006 - 14:17:19
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