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Mountain bike festival sets summer records

Whistler’s appeal as a summer destination is increasing every year, with more visitors making the trip up Highway 99 to enjoy everything from beaches to bars to bungee jumping.

Whistler’s appeal as a summer destination is increasing every year, with more visitors making the trip up Highway 99 to enjoy everything from beaches to bars to bungee jumping.

Mountain biking has always been part of that appeal, and the RMOW, Tourism Whistler and Whistler-Blackcomb have worked over the years to develop and market the resort as "one of the top bike towns in North America, with world-class trails and with international, national and regional biking competitions," according to the RMOW’s Vision 2002 planning document.

If there were any doubts about the viability of mountain bike tourism, the Whistler Summer Gravity Festival which wrapped up last weekend should go a long way towards erasing them.

The number of spectators for the national mountain bike championships and events like the Joyride Bikercross and Shimano Slopestyle were in the thousands, and exhibitions like the trials competition and the North Shore’s Flow RIDERS packed the village from morning until afternoon.

The Whistler Mountain Bike Park had a milestone day on Saturday, July 19, with 1,115 rider visits, not counting the national downhill competitors. It was the first time in its history that the park had broken the thousand rider mark.

Other businesses, including hotels, restaurants and rental shops, also saw an increase in business over the weekend compared to past years, according to festival producer Richard Juryn.

Although Tourism Whistler is still collecting numbers from hotels, Juryn said he was told that the occupancy in the village was the highest it has ever been outside of long weekends.

So far the feedback has been positive, he said, and the organizers and sponsors are considering the event a success.

"What really brought it home for me was a conversation I had with Hans Rey, this internationally famous trials rider. He has travelled all over the world with his bike, and he was just freaking out. He rode the bike park a couple of days, he went for a ride on A River Runs Through It, he watched the events, and his comment to me was that what’s happing in Whistler is un-effing-believable. He said we were probably three years ahead of anyone else in the world when it comes to bike culture," said Juryn.

One of the reasons Whistler’s biking stands out is because of the passion of the local riders, said Juryn, building and maintaining trails around Whistler, both on the mountain and off.

"How many other communities have a group like WORCA (Whistler Off Road Cycling Association) with a thousand members? Nobody has that," he said.

While the festival has obvious appeal to mountain bikers, and the nationals are guaranteed to attract a good crowd, Juryn says some of his most positive feedback came from people who know nothing about the sport.

"You don’t need to anything about mountain biking to appreciate an event like the slopestyle, or the Village Crit, or the trials demonstrations, or Dangerous Dan’s (Cowan) Flow RIDERS dropping 25 feet off little bridges into the middle of a crowd," said Juryn.

"What we’ve tried to do is to create an event that does appeal to the average person. That’s what I tried to do the Whistler Mountain Bike Festival last fall.

"The mountain bikers, the really hard-core guys and girls, are going to come anyway."

Another thing that sets Whistler apart, says Juryn, was the kind of support locals gave to the festival.

"The mountains, the municipality, Tourism Whistler, they were absolutely incredible in providing support for this event. Whatever we needed, we got," said Juryn.

Locals also kicked in 750 volunteer shifts over seven days, with 18 mostly unpaid crew chiefs putting in 14 hour days sometimes to get the events ready.

"It helped that the people involved were into it, into biking, and were excited about it. Whenever they did something, they did it right, as perfectly as possible. Nobody did anything half-assed," he said.

Chris Winter of Joyride Productions, an event company he started with Paddy Kaye, says the main reason that the Joyride Bikercross, Air Downhill and slopestyle have been able to attract huge numbers is because they are crowd friendly events.

"The village was as busy as I’ve ever seen it, and we had good crowds out to all of the events," he said. "Some people were definitely not there for the mountain biking, but these events (bikercross and slopestyle) are so cool to watch that they can suck you in. You can stand at the bottom of Whistler and see everything.

"I’m usually happy that the riders are stoked to be here, but to have the crowds we did, and to find out later that we were helping to set records in the mountain bike park and bring more business to the resort was just the icing on the cake."

The Whistler Summer Gravity Festival will be back again next year, once again following the World Cup events at Grouse Mountain that bring some of the top mountain bikers in the world to the region.

The UCI, the world sanctioning body for mountain bike racing, grants World Cup events to host cities for three years at a time, and although this was the third year for Grouse, organizers are confident that it will come back to Vancouver again next year.

The World Cup was originally slated for Whistler, but was dropped as a result of disagreements between TEAM Management, which held the rights to produce the event, and members of W3, which includes Whistler-Blackcomb, Tourism Whistler, and the RMOW.

TEAM Management folded as a result of the dispute, effectively cancelling the annual Whistler Summer Session mountain bike festival before the 2001 event.

Although the end of Summer Session did not put an end to events in Whistler, the Whistler Summer Gravity Festival fills the void for a large-scale mountain bike festival.