Fabien Barel, Sam Hill and Mike Jones: Alexandra, NZ

That's not faint praise when it comes from Fabien Barel. After a week of riding with his long-time adversary, his respect for him seems to have only grown. What you might not expect from two men who built reputations as deadly serious racers is that they had fun too. Fabien explains, "It was really fun riding with Sam, I studied my adversaries during my years racing downhill, so I already knew a lot about his riding style. Getting the chance to actually ride with him, follow his wheel, ride behind someone like Sam who has really inspired me in my bike development, in my riding position, it was such good fun. It's so much better riding behind him than just watching it in videos, although sometimes I was watching him so closely I wasn't looking where I was going!"

Both Fabien and Sam are specialists at hunting the greatest and hardest-won prize in the sport: World Championship titles. While it's not easy to win a World Cup title, it's a completely different game to focus on the World Championships. You have one run, one chance. There is no margin for error and you have to put it all on the line to even stand a chance of winning. As Sam explains, "Not all riders focus on it that much, but I think, it was always one of my focuses and for Fabien as well. He was a bit of a nemesis." To win at that level means shutting yourself off from other people, so while they built a huge amount of respect for each other as competitors, they had never spent time like this together away from the races.

It's a hard pairing to imagine, you'd struggle to picture two more different characters. The outgoing, charismatic Barel and the quiet, almost monosyllabic Hill. Sam admits that through all their years of racing against each other this has never happened before, "It is the first time we have properly hung out instead of staring across the pits at each other. It's been good - not racing each other, just having a good time and a laugh on the tracks." Fabien acknowledges that while they are very different in some ways, there are things that pull them together, "I always had a good feeling with Sam in the paddock. You know how he's the quiet guy, and many people sometimes thought that it was ego, but from my point of view, it wasn't - he was just being shy and not too comfortable when too many loud people were around. Here we had a chance to get away from all that and just be ourselves. We have completely different personalities off of the bike, but we have a lot of similarities on the bike - so even if our personalities are different we are definitely linked through our past and our approach to racing."













So where do you take two riders like this to ride together for the first time? It's going to need to be somewhere special and it's going to need to push them. They found the perfect location in Alexandra. It isn't the New Zealand you see on postcards. Geography and road building aren't on Alexandra's side. As you drive south from Christchurch towards the giant playground that is the Southern Alps the main highway misses the town by 30 kilometres. Those are 30 important kilometres, though, and few people venture off that main route. So while it's southern neighbour, Queenstown, has flourished and grown as the self-proclaimed Outdoor Capital of the World, Alexandra has been left as something of a backwater, which is a shame.

Sitting in the heart of the South Island it is the driest place in New Zealand. The impressive Old Man Range towers some 1,500m over the low-lying basin where the town lies. On either side rivers cut through the high, rocky gorges. Closer in are the two smaller ranges of hills, Old Flattop and the Nobbies. It's unique, almost desert-like conditions mean it can baking hot down in the basin, but when you climb towards the higher peaks you are directly exposed to Antarctic weather, a twenty-degree temperature difference is not uncommon. These extremes create a distinctively different landscape, undoubtedly beautiful, but far harsher than the New Zealand most of us are familiar with.

It has never been an easy place to make a living, and while money has poured into the tourist-heavy towns nearby, Alexandra has retained its blue-collar feel. The local riding community is small but hard-working and active with no flashy bike parks or trail centres. They don't mind that much, though, and have quietly dug themselves one of the most extensive trail networks anywhere in New Zealand. The terrain doesn't lend itself to easy trails, and the locals here clearly aren't scared of taking their lines down the nastiest parts of the hills - linking together the rough, black rock and near cliff-faces into a spiders web of riding, perfect to challenge even riders of this calibre.












Fabien instantly fell in love with the trails, "I love the mix of sand and rock, it lets you be really playful. Those rocks were really grippy because it's quite an aggressive surface and on the other hand, you have really drifty sand. The only place I have ever ridden that is similar is Mammoth Mountain in California. I really enjoy that type of terrain as it's really diverse and fun to ride. I was honestly surprised with how steep the tracks could get, and how technical they could get with so little slope and height." Sam echoes this, "Every other trail out there is crazy, it's a pretty crazy landscape. I like it because it's quite loose and rocky, with big chunks of sand, lots of roll-ins and cliff faces - you don't want to crash here."

"Sam and I are definitely just like everyone else - when you ride with friends you always want to have fun, you always want to go faster. It's part of the fun of playing on bikes," says Fabien. "The commitment, the excitement, and the type of pressure of having a good rider on your back means you are always pushing. There's no ego, it's just pleasure, but there is no doubt that when we ride together we ride at a different speed to when we are on our own." Putting the two of them together really brings out the contrasts in style between two riders who were often only separated by tenths of a second on the racetrack.

Nowhere are the differences clearer than on the trail the locals have affectionately called "The Rock of Doom." To run into the infamous rock, you thread the needle between a series of awkward rocks onto the boulder, then drop off the bottom and into a shady-looking slap berm to shoot you off to the right and on with the trail. Sam runs in first with Fabien on his wheel. Through the rocks, Sam keeps it level, no fuss, no drama, just cleanly through onto the boulder. As Fabien reaches the boulder he picks the bike up, clearing the rocks and landing on the boulder front-wheel first, pivoting on the front before compressing the bike down ready for the coming drop. This gives Fabien a little ground on Sam as they go into the drop.

Coming off the drop Sam speeds towards the corner, pedals flat in defiance of every "How to Ride" manual ever written. Somehow at the start of the corner he finds traction on the entry and squares it all off, cutting across the arc of the berm and launching himself like a missile into the trail. Fabien follows the formbook, inner leg cocked, and rails the outside, using the momentum to leap back into the trail. On a 30 centimetre-wide stretch of the trail, there are maybe 20 centimetres of difference, they exit at fundamentally different trajectories. Sam has reclaimed the small advantage Fabien found on the boulder, maybe even pulled slightly away with his straighter line into the trail. Fabien can barely contain his excitement at what he saw, "If you look at Sam, he's one of the rare riders who corners with the pedals really flat. He's definitely the most dynamic rider to transfer from one corner to another."













As soon as the pair of them put tyres to dirt the years of racing, the titles and the defeats no longer seemed to exist. Everything was pared back to just two guys chasing each other's wheels. Admittedly they were going a lot faster than most mere humans can contemplate, but that was always to be expected. Speed aside, it could have been any two riders from the age of about 15 to 50 years old, excitedly pushing the bikes to the trailheads, trying sketchy lines, popping little manuals and hops when the trail allowed, skidding up to the truck. That's the great thing about mountain bikes and trail riding - it's a complete equaliser, we are all taken back to the simple joys of just riding bicycles. As Fabien puts it, "We all have our favourite disciplines; downhill, freeride, freestyle, cross-country, enduro or whatever. At the end of the day, when we take our bikes and go riding with friends we all go riding all-mountain. It's the heart of mountain biking and why we love this sport."

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MENTIONS: @mavic / @mattwragg

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