I’m always on the lookout for new places to build features, the longer I’ve been doing this the further away from home we end up and the harder it becomes to find new and unique challenges to ride. The furthest feature from home in this video is the drop at the end. It is about an hour and a half drive from the nearest cellphone service which had me thinking about the risks of an injury being that far from help. Guess you just have to trust yourself sometimes.
I was hoping to have a month or so to film the video but these things just don’t always work out exactly as planned. Just before Crankworx Rotorua, I had injured myself which took me out for 6 weeks. I had only one week before surgery and no time to get used to the new bike (I had just started riding for Commencal). To my delight, it took just one ride on the bike and we ready to get into the meat of it. Everything ended up working really good thankfully. We battled the weather with big ruts forming on takeoffs after each run but nothing a spade couldn’t fix.
I'm looking forward to getting home soon and scoping out some more features to build... as Freeride is always a good excuse to go camping!
Huge thanks to Scott Robb for always being stoked to film with me and big ups to FSA for always being there for me and my bikes. I've run the full range of FSA components on all my rigs for about 10 years now, so cheers for the confidence in me guys!—Conor Macfarlane
Pretty bummed about Proving Grounds, I felt dialed for a top 3 result and had done everything plenty of times in practice with no crashes (apart from the flip drop) and then it all came unstuck in my runs. I almost feel cursed at Rampage events, I always seem to crash!—Conor Macfarlane
Yeah super gutted. The line you had set up at Proving Grounds was so sick. You had a lot of those hits dialed and tricked on way early on. Definitely were one of my favorites for the event and would have been going in to Rampage as well.
Can't imagine it would have been easy to get the shot where Conor is riding down the gravel pit and the camera is next to him going the same speed on ground level, looked awesome. Film/edit/riding is on point, an edit like this should be a rampage invite IMO.
Its true. Parts of Fernhill dont have cell reception. But seriously get this man a Rampage invite. Why does he even need to enter the "proving grounds"...