7/25/2023 0 Comments Freestyle dirt bike jump rampSipes provided his fellow riders with the biggest heart-in-mouth moment when his bike mysteriously stalled in mid-air, forcing him to bail out mid-jump and hurtle to the ground, with his machine dangerously close behind him. “Ultimately, what we do is not safe by any means, so that was the biggest thing, trying to make it as safe as possible, but obviously, just create new features and things that you’ve never really seen before.” “The sky’s the limit when it comes to creativity, but at the end of the day, with that creativity, safety is paramount,” he says. “This year there was none of that, it was kind of, ‘There’s a bunch of jumps, and a couple of turns, and just figure it out, and do your own thing.’”Īs the ramps and features of the track grew higher, so too did the stakes for the riders, and Bereman admits that safety was near the front of his mind. “Last year’s track was a track, it was, ‘Hey, you’re kinda going in this direction,’ and you could vary it a little bit, but it was kinda like, this is the way you’re supposed to go,” he continues. “I just tried to make the coolest line that I could. “I can’t do the tricks that they can do, I can’t backflip, I can’t even throw the whips the way they can,” the veteran smiles. “I’ve been riding my whole life, since I was three years old, and to be able to learn something new and at the same time be able to compete with the best in the world, that’s just a cool challenge for me to take on and go, ‘Let me figure this out, let me go watch these guys, hang out with these guys.’”īut with his skills honed closer to the ground, he admits he worried about holding his own with riders used to outrageous tricks and jumps. Sipes says he was attracted to the Imagination event by the prospect of trying something new. Ryan Sipes says he was attracted to Imagination by the allure of its novelty. “So coming to this year, it’s kinda like, ‘We already know how big it was, how much bigger can they go?’ Well, they went way bigger than I thought we could go.” “I thought I knew what to expect, when we got there in 2020, it was like, ‘Wow, this is so big, it’s so much bigger than anything I’ve ever seen,’” the 37-year-old Sipes tells CNN Sport. One rider returning for more was Ryan Sipes, a flat track and supercross legend, and 2019’s International Six Days Enduro world champion. The goal for year two was to come back in and just keep adding options and options and options to all the jumps, to more or less create a dirt skatepark.” “We kind of ran out of time building everything we wanted, so after year one, the course sat there and didn’t get touched for a year straight. After the success of 2020’s debut, nine riders were gathered back in Fort Scott, Kansas for its 2021 successor – where Bereman’s mind took the track to even wilder frontiers. The Red Bull Imagination events take this to the extreme. Tyler Bereman, Josh Hill, Christian Dresser, Ryan Sipes, Tom Parsons getting ready for their runs at Imagination 2. “It’s having our own form of expression through our dirt bikes and just being able to go out there and have fun and find jumps and, ultimately, just be free on your dirt bike.” To Bereman, freeriding is all about the pure freedom of riding. “The biggest thing I can relate it to, to the outside public, would be that there’s contest snowboarding and then, like, backcountry snowboarding, so riding the powder and the hills, and the same with street skating, there’s contest skating and then there’s street skating where people are just out on the streets and filming.” There are parallels with both snowboarding and skating where Bereman has focused his career. Ultimately, it’s what I would call Freeriding.” “Obviously, in motocross, there’s freestyle, where they’re doing flips and tricks and all that stuff, and I kind of fell in between those two genres there. “I grew up racing motorcycles, and racing supercross and motocross inside stadiums, and then ultimately got hurt too much and had to take a back seat on that,” he explains. The Californian has been riding motorcycles since he was barely more than a toddler, and this variation of the sport is one that he has helped to define. At Bereman’s direction, the builders had the freedom to build whatever they wanted to, “drawing out features from other action sports,” he explains. “We started with nothing, just a rolling hill.”Ī seven-man crew worked for three weeks using tractors and earth-moving equipment to carve out the first Imagination course in 2020. “I have it all in my head,” the 30-year-old tells CNN Sport, grinning out from beneath a mop of blond hair and a baseball cap. Tyler Bereman riding at Red Bull Imagination 2.
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