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| Ride the Giant 3 |
| August 5th, 2010 |
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Review courtesy of Nick Breton. Nick rides for Sayshun Longboards and Darkspeed Concepts.
How do you make one of North America's most challenging and exciting roads even better than it already is? Simple: Road features. Feature was the name of the game this year in Summerland, BC, where close to 100 riders got more than their money's worth at the third annual Ride the Giant. An ever-expanding event, this year skipped the hay bales (!) and added half of a lumber yard of wood to add extra fun (and fright) to this already awesome course.
A thirty-odd foot long wall ride, a proper kicker and a roll-in to dirt path super-shortcut were not only stupid fun to ride, but were key parts to the whole weekend. That's because this year the organizers decided to challenge the riders not only during the race, but also to complete scorecard objectives during the entire three-day event. Now, standup runs, coring wheels, early grabs and switch riding were more than just proper fun on the hill, this year they helped the one determined rider who checked off the most objectives to win back his entry fee. The first two days flew by in a flurry of laughs, slides, airs and crashes.
The weekend was finished off with what many of us had forgotten about with all of the freeriding: The race! Head to head racing on the Showtime Five corners is hard enough for anyone, but the top eight moved all the way up to the end of the tightrope to battle it out. In a fitting end, hometown Prince Dillon beat out Zak Maytum, Yates and Grizz took third and fourth (or fourth and third, depending on who you ask) and I'm willing to guess close to half of the participants either won, caught or simply got hit by a free set of wheels at some point or another during the event. We all won by simply getting in on this weekend.
This event was unique enough back in its first year, but Andrew and his team continue to make Ride the Giant truly something special. Whatever the fourth year holds for us, I recommend you bring some spare wheels, full-day skating legs and a healthy stack of bandaids. |
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