Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

The culture of Crankworx

A Whistler Bike Park seemed like a good idea, and the rest of the mountain bike world is still trying to catch up
63519_l

Rob McSkimming wanted a bike park. This was in the late 1990s, when mountain biking had broken through cult status and had gained a steady following. As rival entities until 1997, Whistler and Blackcomb had been facilitating independently-owned mountain biking ventures. McSkimming, vice president of business development at Whistler Blackcomb, thought a bike park was a no-brainer for the community.

So, in 1999, he helped construct what was at that time a modest-sized bike park - small potatoes really, with a miniscule budget and little fanfare. It attracted around 10,000 visitors that year.

Two years later, the A Line trail was built and the number of visitors tripled. And it grew. And it grew some more until, eight years later, Whistler Mountain was teeming with mud-soaked riders hurling themselves down the trails. The skill centre was crawling with kids on $7,000+ bikes. Sixty-five-year-old riders were taking casual rides around Lost Lake park on Wednesday nights.

And there was that behemoth inflatable Kokanee can at the base of the mountain signifying the triumph of Crankworx - Whistler's biggest and most popular summer festival.

"I had no clue where it was headed or how big it would all get," McSkimming says. "When we first started (the bike park) it was really quite small. We hoped that we'd be able to get it bigger, certainly in those early years.

"It has surpassed anything I imagined going in, for sure."

Crankworx, now in its seventh year, is the apex of Whistler mountain culture. This year alone has attracted 800 unique riders. Thousands of people fill the hotels. They drink the beer and tip the servers. They give the local economy a strong enough jolt that the municipality welcomes the event with arms wide open, year after year. The Crankworx festival has been so successful that Whistler Blackcomb - who runs the event - has licensed the name to a similar event at Winter Park, Colorado for four years straight. (Winter Park is operated by Whistler Blackcomb's parent company, Intrawest.)

The top riders travel here from around the world for the festival. Jeremy Roche, general manager of Crankworx, says mountain bike enthusiasts are "literally star struck" when they see the top riders strolling through Whistler Village, as if these riders are the Rat Pack on bicycles.

"What we're finding with industry representatives is people aspire to be sent to Kokanee Crankworx," Roche says. "It truly is one of the places where business and pleasure goes right along a line. That talks about how we operate in Whistler, both as bikers and business people."

He's speaking to Pique between sips from a Kokanee bottle at the GLC. Out the window behind him, riders are whizzing down the GLC drops in blurs of green and white, red and yellow, black and blue.

The base of the mountain is dotted with ramps of bright pink, green and blue. Scaffolding marks the dirt leading halfway up the run and at the head of it all is a monstrous TV screen playing the races out in real time, zooming up the riders to 100 times their actual size for the benefit of the hundreds of spectators hanging around the Longhorn and the various sponsor tents. The village is bustling, man - it's crowded down there. And it's only Day 2.

The mountain bike culture, like any culture really, grew organically, though McSkimming says there were "explosive" critical moments in the bike park's development. Once the A-Line run was built in 2001, the sport really took off and the riders, of all shapes, colours and ages, came in droves.

In the first years following the bike park's completion, there were several bike festivals taking place separately. These paved the way for the Summer Gravity festival, which ran for two years until Whistler Blackcomb took over the rights.

Crankworx, glorious Crankworx, was born. It was a grassroots event then. Something for the locals, y'know... until the world-class riders showed up. Then the festival was extended from a four-day event to a five-day event. Then nine days. Corporate interest grew, hence the mega screen and the Kokanee can.

"From a racing perspective, the number of riders who come to a non-sanctioned event without tour points is quite phenomenal. We have some real heavy hitters that come to compete here," Roche said.

Organizers work the Crankworx schedule around the World Cup challenges to accommodate the top riders. The Crankworx races don't feed into the World Cup at all and yet hundreds of elite riders from around the world come to race.

"It's pretty much the best place to hold an event," said Nanaimo-born downhill rider Steve Smith.

This isn't a B.C. boy taking pride in what his province has to offer. He gets around. He races downhill on the World Cup circuit. He reached his first podium last week in Italy, the first Canadian to do so in 15 years. Dude knows his mountains.

There's Dirt-jumping, see. Downhill. Cross-country. None of this is news. There's hardly a reason to write about it except to tell you, Faithful Reader, that what Whistler folks might take for granted, racers from Spain and France and South Africa can't wait to experience, particularly during Crankworx.

"For the racers, this is an exciting event, mainly because it's more relaxed," Smith says. "It's not as high-stress as those World Cup races can be. A lot of the racers come here to ride for fun, do some races and chill out. It's the perfect place to do it."

"When I first landed this job, I didn't fully comprehend the importance of this event in the overall mountain bike industry," Roche says. "Over the years, I've come to recognize that Crankworx is an important time for the industry to congregate."

This year, there are 275 accredited media - top writers, videographers and photographers in this field set up camp for nine days to swallow the event up and spray it across the media landscape in the most flattering way possible.

An aggressive marketing campaign featuring a heavy rotation of a Kokanee Crankworx beer commercial and Crankworx-specific beer can sold across the country means the festival - and by extension, Whistler mountain bike culture - is literally clasped in the hands of Manitoba dairy farmers.

The municipality gave their full support to the sport from the very beginning, nurturing the homegrown talent and welcoming unconditionally riders from around the world as Crankworx grew, fostering what is clearly a unique and lively mountain bike culture.

"We are purpose-built as a resort and resorts like to welcome guests," says John Rae, manager of strategic alliances at the RMOW. "When Crankworx rolls into town, this place goes off. We, therefore, get to show ourselves at our best."

He estimates the economic impact of the event is between $11million and $12 million.

"As you can imagine, a lot of that community impact goes back... to the entire community. It means businesses stay healthy. The resort feels energized. We're getting better at our service programs. It has a remarkable and favourable impact across every sector."

"This is where that mountain bike culture assists us because of the pervasiveness of that culture in Whistler," Roche says. "So many people are interested both personally and professionally to be a part of Crankworx, to support Crankworx and help Crankworx be successful that it is (successful)."

All of this from a little idea one cycling enthusiast had in the late 1990s. Whistler has cultivated a passionate group of athletes that, when herded together, breed a seriously competitive culture that is unparalleled worldwide.

And McSkimming started it all.

"Rob truly is the unequivocal number one most influential person in the mountain bike community in the world," Rae says. "He truly is a visionary when it comes to this sport and the favourable impact that this sport has had on this community."

It's the type of community that promotes 100,000-plus people hurling themselves down a mountainside with a bit of steel between their thighs. It's the type of community where mud-soaked riders eat pricey paninis at cafes along the Village Stroll.

The type of community where a writer for the Pique , looking for a little piece of mind before deadline, steps into the woods behind Function Junction and stumbles upon an impressive make-shift bike circuit, with three young men sitting under a canopy made of sticks and tarp in the middle of it all, admiring what they've dug up all by themselves, for the love of their sport.