Riding in the off season with Sam Pilgrim

How does Sam Pilgrim like to chill out after loud and full season of contests? Check out how in this short photo-story.

Finally, there is no huge crowd, harsh judging juries, oversized and scary jumps, riders can go and feel the pure satisfaction of doing what they like the best in life!

Sam came up to our local jumps one early afternoon. He knows this place, has been here before, but still we had some surprises for him. All of the main line is rebuilt, now.

He took a quick look...
Obviously, he wasted no time and straight away went to check how flowy the line is. Not needing much time to warm up, with every run he started pulling bigger and better tricks from his bag! It helped that I egged him on by saying that I had got a really cool photo with Sam Reynolds doing a stunning sideways whip on this set...


Yes! Sam quickly showed he can do it with style as well.


I already knew it was gonna be a good session. Like I wrote before, Sam was not hiding his rich dirt jumping skills. Look at this massive 360 with over twisted x-up! Simply incredible...


Tailwhip? No problem!


The only thing that I regret from that day [except, I got a ticket for bad parking two hours after the session], is that the jumps were 'too slow' because of the wet soil and Sam could not attempt 'Superflip'. Next time for sure...

After some time on the dirt jumps, we moved to another section in Woburn Sands woods. It was a really nice and smooth hip jump which many riders truly enjoy and it was not any different with Sam. I must say, I am a big fan of the 'tabletop' trick. Done in a proper and stylish way, they always look beautiful. Like any other rider before, I asked Sam to give me this trick. You do not know how surprised I was when he said he cannot do them good enough. I just could not believe and told him to give it a try... Two, Three attempts and I showed him that he is wrong saying they are not stylish.


After that we decided to move again, this time to a sweet transfer jump and this was our best choice that day. Sam really enjoyed this transfer, I was trying to find the best angle and finally got it when he was jumping it for the last time! When I looked onto the preview screen in my camera I felt such a relief... Sure shot!


Last move of the day... Fresh and brand new pumptrack, finished right before Sam showed up, so of course he could not miss this opportunity to test it!


No doubt he liked that track, fun was so good that he could not resist pretending he is on a dirtbike!


It was getting dark, so I decided to go somewhere else and take a couple shots of Sam and his bike, this time - standing still on the ground. Across the road there is an abandoned warehouse, which I thought would be great for this type of photo shoot. While I was shooting Sam's 'flying machine'...


...Sam together with Sam and Matt [local dirt jumpers] were really busy with... destroying the last standing bits of the warehouse! You should have see their faces when 5 minutes later the police officer showed on the site. After he put their feet on the ground, we talked a bit about many useless things and slowly everybody spread out back to home.

Yeah, we all love events, the unique hype, huge jumps, many skillful riders in one place, simply the whole atmosphere. But days like this, are a precious time for riding, chilling, laughing and full of funny things...

I say, keep an eye on this dude, 'coz he is gonna go BIG this year, for sure! (Since the time that this article was submitted, Sam has won the WhiteStyle contest at Leogang)


Big thanks for a great companion to Sam and Matt.



Peace out and wishing you all as many days like this as possible!

Related links:
www.sampilgrim.co.uk
sampilgrim.pinkbike.com

High Quality prints of my photos are directly available at photobox.co.uk

Words and Photos by Simon 'lunatyk' Nieborak

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