Returning soon to the rugged cliffs outside Zion National Park in Utah for the 10th year running is an event that has changed the sport of mountain biking. It’s Red Bull Rampage 2015.
In a retrospective over the past decade, two-time Rampage champion Kyle Strait reflects on how far this extreme event has come and how it’s altered the sport of mountain biking as a whole.
This is not your average mountain biking competition. Rampage takes place on a nearly vertical environment, where the impossible somehow becomes reality, and riders are quite possibly risking their lives.
“It’s been a long process and a lot of fun,” Strait says in a Red Bull video released in preparation for the event’s 10th anniversary.
Strait leads viewers through the three venue areas that have comprised the past 10 years of racing on perhaps the most extreme competitive mountain biking events on the planet. This is where competitors huck themselves down 40-foot cliffs, tempting spins and flips in the name of being a champion.
“This is like the Colleseum right here,” he says at one point, surveying the first venue that started it all in 2001. “How many stories and how many things went down here?”
In 2004, the event took a three-year hiatus when event organizers worried the competition had become too dangerous. The new design featured not only ridge lines, but more features and gaps. Now riders were really pushing the limits of the sport. The first backflip off a drop, was recorded, in 2013.
“We went from knowing exactly every signle ridge to almost no-man’s land,” says Strait.
By 2014, the event took on a third venue, this time on the other side of the valley, where it will once again play host to this year’s 2015 competition beginning Oct 16.
Tune in live at Redbull.tv.
