Paddy Kaye Interview - Kokanee Crankworx 2011

In the early 2000's he and Chris Winter organized the Joyride Bikercross and the Joyride Slopestyle Expression session which were held during the Whistler Summer Gravity Festival. It could be argued that he was largely responsible for the whole slopestyle phenomena and the evolution from those early events to the present state of the discipline has been nothing but astounding.

For the past several years John Cowan has been responsible for building the slopestyle course. For 2011 a new sponsor was brought in in the form of Redbull and they decided to enlist the services of Paddy Kaye and his Joyride Bike Parks building crew. The new course is very different from past years. We caught up with Paddy to find out a little about how the process from start to finish went and to find out how he and the riders feel now that the course is completed and ready to go for the big show on Saturday.




You are involved with the festival again, something you had a helping hand in during the early years, how's it feel?

It Feels good, it feels awesome, its almost like a homecoming type deal and it's almost like I never left. Just working with the crew in the bike park and slapping high fives with everyone riding the park, all my friends are here, so yeah, it's been awesome.




Crankworx went a slightly different route this year, a new sponsor for the slopestyle with Redbull and a new direction by inviting several key riders spanning the different eras of the discipline to help design the course. What has your involvement been?

I was part of that whole process right from the start and I guess really how it went was that after Rampage, I was involved in doing the build for that which was a major Redbull event they decided they wanted to take mountain biking a little more seriously. They approached me about being involved in a new event and we could possibly take it to Crankworx. So that was our first stab at it and I think it was just good timing with this festival and the event to sort of refresh it, rebrand it and rebuild it. Basically the stars aligned you know and from there we did it, we were like, "how are we going to do this right? Lets enlist some of the best athletes in the world to do that."

We just decided that for Redbull and myself to succeed we would need some input from the athletes who have been riding this comp for many years and get their direct feedback.

Redbull came up with the idea to all sit down at the table in February and we enlisted Scott Dixon to do the artwork for us and it worked out really good actually. At first I was a little hesitant, I thought maybe we'd get too many different ideas, that these guys would be all over the place, but really they were all saying the same thing. It was more like making things big, simplify it and work on the flow, figure out how to build good jumps on this slope which is very challenging cause it's pretty steep for these types of jumps.

So these guys had some great ideas on how to work with the line and came up with a really cool sort of cartoon rendition of what the course would look like and it's actually translated really well in the build process.

I've had the athletes coming up at least once a week type deal to sort of check on it and to look at the jumps and help me with them. It's just worked out really good and I think we have a great final product although we didn't build 100% of our design, I would say it's about 80%.

The idea there is that we were focusing on the key jumps and had to axe a few features that were extra just to make sure that we succeeded this year. As we evolve and hopefully this works I will be back next year and we'll add to this and we'll evolve this course over the next few years. That's the idea.




You and your crew have been busy all spring building. Now that the riders have been practicing on the course what is their response and are you happy with the final product?

Yeah, the response has been really amazing and it is hard to get 100% positive feedback, but it has been I would say 99%. There is a couple of small tweaks, we changed a landing yesterday and we changed another landing this morning, sort of, you know the pitch and just making things flow better for these guys.

So nothing unexpected, no, nothing major, just real small tweaks and ya, everybody's psyched and we're going to have an amazing show. We're going to see a lot of tricks from a lot of different guys top to bottom on this course. So I think we've met our goal and we'll find out for sure on Saturday.


*LIVE WEBCAST STARTS AT 5PM PST, JULY 23RD, 2011*

Posted In:
Interviews Crankworx