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just a bit of ben boyko

Jan 27, 2009 at 12:04
by ross taylor  
....he started riding BMX when I was 13 years old. I had some dirt jumps along side of the house that I built. There was really nowhere to ride that wasgood back then and there weren’t a lot of skate parks, so in 1994 my parents and I built a halfpipe in our backyard for me to ride.
At the same time a few pro riders moved into town, like Dave Osato for instance. They came by on a daily basis to ride and riding with Dave was good for me to learn. There was also a guy named Neil Sanders. He was about 19 back then. He owned a bike shop and he was really into BMX riding. Him and Dave and some other friends came by to ride the ramps with me and go street riding after. We did that for a few years and during that time I was competing in pro contests at an expert level. The dirt jumps alongside the house kept getting bigger and bigger, but in 1998, the ramps came down, because all the neighbours had filed a petition. They didn’t like us hanging out so the city decided that the ramps must come down. From then on I had to go down across the boarder to the US in order to ride. A friend of mine in Blaine, about an hour drive away, had some ramps in the backyard. So it became the place where I trained and rode and had all my friends.

Later, Neil closed up his bike shop and moved down to California to get involved in some movie making and mountain biking from what I heard. We lost touch for a while but in 2002, I ended up bumping into Neil at a skate park in North Vancouver. He told me about some mountain bike movies that he had made called the ‘Super Heroes’ series. He said if I ever wanted to come to California one day and ride, I could stay at his place and try mountain biking. I kept his number but put the offer aside. In 2003, one year later, I ran into Neil again at the skate park in Whistler and he showed me some footage of a mountain bike contest that he had on his camera. I think it was footage of the Joyride and he asked me what I thought. I was totally inspired by the footage and thought it was pretty cool. He mentioned that he was working on his new movie called Super Heroes 4 and I also showed him some footage on my camera of my friends and me riding, and he thought that was really cool too. He asked me if I would like to come down to California and film for his new movie SH4 on a mountain bike. He wanted to pay for my trip, take me on a road trip and if I really liked it he would get me some mountain bikes. I ended up arranging a trip to California not too late after that.

I borrowed Neil’s hard tail. We rode at pretty much every city in California and ended up in Woodward West. The trip was amazing and I don’t even think I rode my BMX for more than 10 minutes. After I had picked up the mountain bike I couldn’t put it down because it was too much fun. Neil asked me if I wanted to be on his team and I said yes. Shortly after that I got a
few mountain bikes, a hard tail which I used to ride dirt jumps and a Santa Cruz VP FREE. I rode in Whistler and during that time I was transitioning all my BMX tricks onto the mountain bike. It was easy on the hard tail – the dirt jump tricks came almost automatically – but it was more difficult to learn things on the full suspension. I worked really hard at riding the full suspension, because this was my area of interest. I built a 25-feet (7,6 m) long and 20-feet (6 m) high road gap on the Northshore in Vancouver and used it to practice. I had hit smaller ones before, but that was the first big one I hit and it was really scary for the first time. I decided to enter my first MTB contest in 2005, the Sea Otter Dirt Jump Contest. I came in 6th. I was pretty happy with the result, but I knew I could have done better. I could have done more on BMX, but I hadn’t transitioned all those tricks to the mountain bike yet.

Then Neil had some problems in California and the team split up after one year - there were no more super heroes. I ended up getting a sponsorship with Cove Bikes in the beginning of 2006. I guess they recognised me although I didn’t have a big name yet, but judging from some footage I showed them and some magazine exposure that I had got, they saw that I had potential. Seeing that I got a sponsorship with Cove, Sombrio was also interested in sponsoring me for the same reasons, as well as team Gravity. The first contest I rode for Cove was actually a jam, the jumping jam at Jordie Lunn’s backyard and I ended up winning that one. Gabe Fox, the marketing manager of Cove bikes, used that result to get me into 26Trixx and the Adidas Slopestyle. I became top five at 26Trixx and I was really happy with the result. Through the Adidas Slopestyle people really started recognising me, because I had a couple of good runs and I came in first after the two qualifier

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Member since Oct 7, 2008
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