Interview: Ash Smith

The Mavic Trans-Provence is, arguably, the wildest race in mountain biking. Over six days competitors tackle more than 14,000m of descending over a 280km route. It's not graded, family-friendly bikepark tracks either, but wild, backcountry descents that can throw anything at you. It's raced blind. There's no practice, no course walk. You reach the top of the stage and the first time you know what is coming is when you hit it at race pace...

Yet behind it all is one man who simply likes riding new trails, Ash Smith. A quiet man who lives with his young family on the peaceful slopes above Sospel. We caught up with him at home to ask him about how his search for singletrack turned into a race, blind racing and the importance of ancient market towns for mountain biking.



Where did the Trans Provence come from?
I've always been the sort of person who likes going on big adventures and stuff. It probably started... Really... In 2002 when I did the GR5, which is a big walking route from Lake Geneva to Nice on my bike, because I thought "why not do it on my bike?" And the last couple of days of that start to come through the Maritime Alps. I fell in love with the area and a few different things happened between then and now, hahaha. That's when it started anyway, back in 2002.

I did some other trail-guiding projects and at Easter in 2006 we decided to not go for a ski weekend and decided to go for a bit of mountain biking. It was a late Easter, it was late April and we thought "you can ride in April, you don't have to go to the Alps and ski, you can go to the Southern Alps and ride a bike." We went and saw Ady at Riviera Bike, in Molini di Triora, Northern Italy, for two days and then we decided to go to Sospel, which is this place that I had heard about. We spent two days in Sospel and I thought, "These trails are pretty good." Every time we had more than two or three days spare after that we decided to come back down to this part of the world, but a slightly different area every time. Gradually we started putting together a long-distance itinerary. My history before that was in mountain bike trail guiding and the idea was to put together a route to guide on. And yeah, that's how it came about.

How did it end up being a race?
To be straight down the line, what does happen quite often, I think, is that people come into this sort of occupation by saying "I want to run a mountain bike event, I want to run a mountain bike race and it's going to be really big, and it's going to be all this... Right, how am I going to do it?" It's a bit of a top-down approach. For me, I've never really been a racer, so I didn't have the "event, event, event!" mindset. Back in 2003, 2004, I didn't really know what enduro was, for me it was all about the trails. I was putting together a mountain bike route to guide on, and from that point of view it was ground-up. The trails were the key thing.


So you didn't have enduro in mind originally?
No, not really. What I did realise, I think that at some point I had maybe had these flickers of thoughts about making it into a race, but it definitely wasn't supposed to be a race at first. When I had these transient considerations about maybe making it a race, I knew that I wanted to make it more descending than uphill, because that's how you would test the riders, not just on fitness, but on technical riding ability. I still hadn't heard of enduro at this point, I didn't realise they were already doing that in enduro. So I thought about all that separately to the enduro movement. When I properly started to hear about enduro in 2007, 2008, it kind of became apparent that once you'd got this format, you can apply the timing anywhere you want really and you've got an enduro race. I'll openly admit that it wasn't just my idea to make it into a race, I was encouraged by other people, along with having the semi-thoughts myself. I was encouraged by a specific set of people to do it. The nice thing now is that it has come full-circle because we're also doing it as a guided trip now, like it was originally intended to be. So now we've got the race and the guided trips and they've got a bit of a synergy, kind of help each other along.

So when was the route first used?
The first Trans Provence race was in 2009. I hadn't been running the route before then, we didn't run it as a guided trip before that. So even though we originally intended to be a guided trip, the first proper operation of the route was the race in 2009. Which means this year, 2013, will be the fifth edition of the race. The first time we came to Sospel was that Easter in 2006, seven years ago, so you could say it was seven years ago that it all started, gradually coming together.


Today, it's quite a big race, how did the race grow?
I'm not sure really... The first's race had 32 participants, compared to 72 now, so just under half the size. 32 was based on a multiple of the number of people that can fit into a T5 Transporter for the uplifts. We do a trailhead shuttle each morning, so it's two waves of two buses with trailers on the back. The people who raced the first year were generally friends of mine, or friends of friends who had heard about it by word of mouth. Generally a high level of rider, but a rider that didn't really know what they were getting themselves into because in 2009 certainly the anglophone mountain bike world didn't really know what enduro was. They hadn't done enduro. They all came into it knowing it was going to be something a bit new and a bit different and everyone came and got on with it and enjoyed it. We managed to get some pretty good media attention in 2010 and off the back of that the first pro rider who took an interest to it was Mark Weir in the winter of 2011, before the 2011 race, he encouraged quite a lot of other top riders to come along... I still owe Mark a couple of pints for that.

Could you just describe what a day on the Trans-Provence is like for someone who doesn't know much about the race?
So... You wake up in the morning, have a bit of breakfast and drop your kit bag off at the race office so they can be moved on and set up at the next stop for you. You then get on the shuttle bus at either 8 or 9, depending if you're in the first wave or the second wave. You get taken between 500-700m vertical to the trail head and then ride, untimed, to the first special stage. There will then be a series of four special stages over the day with untimed liaisons in between them. Because of the nature of the route and the length of it all and the logistics and the number of people, there aren't set times when you have to get to places for. Our timing system is a free swipe-in, swipe-out system, that came about from orienteering competitions. It's quite a relaxed format, in that sense, and you tend to get a really good atmosphere off the back of it because you get people hanging around together and cheering each other on at the start of special stages. It's all quite relaxed really, people can get back to the camp whenever they want really, it's all signposted and you have maps in your backpack, so it's fairly easy. Follow the signposts, swipe-in, swipe-out on the special stages and ride as fast as you can on the timed bits and try not to hurt yourself too much. And then you get to camp, have a shower, have a massage if you've booked one, have a good feed, have a bit of wine and go to bed... Next day wake up and do the same thing!


One of the big aspects of your race is that the racing is blind. That's something that seem to be going out of favour with the mainstream enduro races.
I think there a lot of different flavours in enduro, I believe that some form of blind racing needs to be maintained. I accept that not all enduro formats and series have that, and that's fine, but I think it would be a shame to do away with on-sight racing all together. That's one of the biggest things about our race. I like to think of it as if you're going to the cinema to see an action movie where you don't know what's going to happen. It's like an interactive action movie where you're obliged to actually take part! That's what special stages should be, for me... It's kind of live adventure, a journey into the unknown. Every second you don't know what's going to happen next and that, for me, is the most pure form of mountain biking. A lot of people actually ride at their best under those sort of conditions. It is certainly a style of riding that gives people great satisfaction, there's the discovery aspect to it as well. That is what it is all about for me and that is want I want to push through with my event.

One of the big problems enduro race organisers have faced is how to keep the racing properly blind, how do you deal with that?
It's easier for us because definitely. You talk about blind racing and a lot of people will say it's 100% impossible in enduro, but it depends where you're coming from really. If you're talking about resorts and centre-based enduro racing, yes it is very challenging, especially if it's centre-based at resorts like Les Deux Alpes or Finale. It's hard to provide that kind of riding in the kind of places that are honeypots that people will flock to, that people know about. Here in the Maritime Alps there is a very healthy enduro racing scene. Eight races per year are hosted once every two, three weeks by the local clubs. They take a lot of pride in cutting in new trails and re-opening ancient trails to provide genuinely blind racing every year. What happens is that a club will host a race and their members won't participate in the race that they're hosting, and it's a rotary system like that. There's a very significant amount of the special stages ridden in enduro racing in this part of the world which are blind riding. Genuinely blind riding from year-to-year. We're slightly getting into a different topic here, but if you're in the right part of the world for it, if you're got enough ancient trails from agricultural history that can be re-opened, you have got new stuff you can do every year. You can use the same general itinerary, ride from the same camp, but a slightly different route. If you do ever run out, you either get the motocross bike out and cut in some more trails, or you go back to the start because people will have forgotten a trail from five years ago, so it is sort of still blind riding.

What is the best way to explain the feel of the trails here in the Maritime Alps?
This part of the world, certainly if we take Sospel where we're sitting now, is a part of the world that people have lived in not just for hundreds and hundreds of years, but for thousands and thousands of years. It's because of the climate to a certain extent, it's a comfortable climate for humans to settle in. For that reason people have lived here for thousands of years and for that reason there are trails everywhere. The trails are, obviously, multi-use trails, they were used for getting from A to B and getting produce to market. Sospel is a classic market town, where you have a centre and through a full 360 degrees you have trails coming down from the mountains into the town. And, what you tend to find is that on the maps less than half the trails are on the maps. If you look closely and actually go into the forest you'll find the foundations of the trails that just need re-opening.

People shouldn't expect perfect berms and sculpted jumps if they come here then?
There are a couple of little bike park things people have put in, but it's mainly what you would call natural riding. I mean, there's no such thing a natural riding, because everything has been somehow or other. Some of the trails here have been built hundreds or even thousands of years ago and the foundations are still there because they were well-built at the time. People needed these trails to get to their closest point of water, or to get to market to get food. We're extremely lucky in this part of the world because of how much terrain there is on offer and the reserves we have in terms of what we can use in our race and how many years we can go for without using the same trails again. But then again, we have a bit of dilemma, there are certain, almost iconic, favourite trails, like Donkey Darko or the big one of the Col du Champs on the Maritime Alps western-most border. Trails which are big favourites, but which eventually I should use something else because it's not blind racing. So there are conflicts in there.



How do you make sure nobody has practiced the course before the race?
I think that people could practice our course. Originally I thought by just having the one route and not changing it you would have on-sight riding, I'll freely admit that I thought people wouldn't want to come back and race it again. But, what we're finding is that the pro riders are coming back and racing it again and again. Because they are coming back, I have to change it and there's nothing stopping people practicing trails that they are pretty sure are going to be on the itinerary because some of the pros do live in this part of the world. It's something that could happen, I'm not sure to what extent they would put time into doing that, because how serious is our race next the Enduro World Series? How serious is our race? A lot of them do see it as a little holiday. I think it's good for the event, and good for my message in general, to change up the route as much as possible each year, so that's what I'm doing.

www.trans-provence.com