People of Crankworx

Words and Photos: Dominic Hook

Crankworx is an event known for its amazing locations that bring incredible mountain biking talent from across the globe to compete or ride for fun in gravity events. Witnessing the skill level of top riders up close is a huge part of why people dig Crankworx and travel from far and wide to get on site for all the action.
 
I’ve been to Crankworx Rotorua for the past 4 years and don’t get me wrong, the above mentioned reasons for going are well worth the trip across the ditch, not to mention all the riding opportunities. However an even stronger attraction to Crankworx is the interaction with such a vast variety of cycling industry experts, athletes and enthusiasts all in one place, over the course of 9 days. You find yourself meeting a huge amount of people all in the same place for the same reason, but with different origin stories, tales and perspectives on the bike world to share.
 
This year at Crankworx I focused on documenting a few of the people I interacted with, rather than just covering what happened between the tape. Hailing from different realms in the bike industry, we talked about the life of a professional racer, how having kids has effected racing at the top level and a different perspective on the growth of mountain biking.
 
All these photos were taken in the moment, allowing the subject to feel comfortable in their own skin. I think these portraits complement the text nicely, by helping you to put a face to the words you’re reading and see a little deeper into the subjects world, almost enabling you to jump through the pages and into the conversation with them yourself.
 
With the world becoming more digital and fleeting day by day, it’s been nice to isolate and highlight these insights from my interactions with the subjects. Taking this on has enabled me to have a deeper connection with and share these interesting perspectives from some industry legends with a wider audience.

Brett Tippie

Brett Tippie should need no introduction. One of the founders of free-ride mountain biking, Brett is now spending his time in the media realm, presenting and commentating events.
He is an extreme bundle of energy and an amazing asset to our sport and it’s history.

“I guess I’d call myself a middle aged action hero. I spend my winters snowboarding and summers mountain biking as well as doing some media work, some announcing, some hosting, some guiding, some coaching, whatever I can do to put food on the table for my family and get some shredding in as well. I’m pretty much a fun pig and I love sports, I love the outdoors, I love people and I feel very lucky to be in this position and I don’t take it for granted.”

“I grew up riding bikes with my dad, he would take me for bike rides as a tiny little kid, we would ride out of town and into the country side and he would do sketches of the wilderness and then come back and turn them into water colours when he got back into town. I wouldn’t really count it as mountain biking but we were off road in the 70s! Riding outdoors makes me think of my dad and the happy childhood that I had.”

“Being in the mountains or in the deserts and what have you, is very emotional. I’ll ride places that I’ve been before and not only will I have good memories of riding there, but I’ll also have so many memories of people that have crashed there, gotten up, conquered their demons and stuck the move they were going for, or had a bit of a party and laughed our guts out until we’ve cried with a bunch of random people from wherever. Different places that I’ve been before will have these memories from decades gone by that make me smile. I’m a lifer and I’ll always ride until I’m not on this planet anymore.”

“I’m 50 years old, but I changed it from 50 years old to level 50, It sounds more badass! I don’t want to age gracefully; I want to rage gracefully. I used to look at people who were 50 years old and think they were so old, and now that I’m there, I don’t feel old. I don’t know if it was Shakespeare or Mark Twayne, but someone said, ‘inside every old person is a young person wondering, what the hell happened!?’. Most of the time I just feel like a kid and laugh life away, think positive and move forward because you’re only as old as the girls you feel, I mean uh, as you want to be. Age is just a number. My wife is 48, so I guess I feel 48?”

“When I first had kids I was sometimes thinking to myself ‘oh my god, I’m not going to be able to shred as much!’, but now that I have kids and I go riding with them and my wife (she’s a hardcore mountain biker from the 80s as well), it’s very rewarding and a more powerful and enriching experience than I ever expected. And… I still get to ride lots! I got some NiteRider lights and if I don’t get to go for a ride in the day, then I’ll go at night when the kids are asleep.”

“I think Crankworx has definitely enriched the sport. With all the disciplines it really hits a broad appeal of people that have different riding passions and different backgrounds. You’ve got some events like the whip-off where you’ve got free-riders, you’ve got downhill racers, you’ve got slope stylers, you’ve got someone from every different area of mountain biking, all competing and mixing together. And also for the people that are watching, it hits a nerve with somebody in a different way from different backgrounds and I think that’s really cool. The vibe is really cool and there’s good action going down and people are getting to see the best riders in the world absolutely hammering the trails that they ride everyday. I think it just really shows the world what you can do on a bicycle and how much fun can be had.”

“Sometimes you’re in a good place, you’re healthy, you’re happy and you’re riding. And sometimes you’re not in a good place and things aren’t working out for you, whether it’s an injury or a drug addiction or a domestic issue or just something in your life that’s not right. I’d just like to tell people that if you can find a time and a place, even just to get a little bit of a bike ride in, it clears your brain and it relieves stress. You can make yourself happy for a little bit and fight through whatever issues you have. Once you’re in a good place it rolls and gets better and better, so never give up hope and keep trying no matter, no matter what.”

Josh Carlson
 
Josh Carlson is an Australian Enduro racer on the Giant Factory Off-Road Team. He lives in Wollongong with his wife and 2 kids, then jets off around the globe to compete in the Enduro World Series. Josh is stoked on life and always up for a chat.

“I raced motocross up until I was 18-19 years old. And then in 2006 I went into the local cross country mountain bike race on a $500 bike with board shorts on and I rocked up wondering what this mountain biking thing was all about. I happened to win the open men that day and then it just kicked off this interest and wonder of like, ‘what is this sport that we have here?’ and then it just snowballed. I bought my own mountain bike in 2007, a Giant anthem and basically tried to figure it out from there. I started entering a few national expert cross country races and then I moved into the under 23 national class. I think in my first under 23 national XC race I lapped 2nd place up in Queensland and I got asked to move up to elite the next round.”

“Growing up as a kid, my dad and I raced motocross and originally the goal was to be a pro motocross rider and race motocross and supercross around Australia or America. That’s what I always dreamed of as a kid and I didn’t really know mountain bikes existed until 2006. I kind of had to put the motor bikes aside in 2005, I had a couple of basic injuries and it just got to the point where my dad and I were putting all our money into this motocross scene and for me to go to the next level, we really had to invest a lot more to make it happen. It’s just a never ending money pit we couldn’t quite commit to and that’s when mountain biking came about.”

“At the end of the day, if you’re fast and fit, strong and capable, it’s up to you to make it happen. Riding well is all reliant on your physical performance and your mental performance to make it happen and once you get in that zone, it’s 100% the best feeling in the world. When you are riding well, you’re feeling fast and you’re winning stages, races or just riding the best that you can ride, there’s pretty much not many feelings in the world like that.”

“Having kids and having a family definitely changes a lot of things. We were living in Vancouver, Canada and had moved over there in 2012. Originally we didn’t really have any plans on coming back, We applied for residency over there and became permanent residents in Canada and that was life as we knew it. And then we had Eli. It changed things a little bit, you realise there’s more things out there than just riding bikes and drinking coffee. You’re doing this thing and it’s just you, then all of a sudden you’ve got a wife, a son and later down the track a little daughter. Now they’re all part of you racing, you’re doing it for them as much as you’re doing it for you. When they watch daddy on the television or when I come home from riding, training or racing and they’re wearing their helmets and my jersey, riding their bikes around the yard, that’s a pretty cool feeling and it makes you realise you’re doing it for more than just yourself. On the other side of things, it definitely makes it harder to leave your family at home. You’re not just leaving your girlfriend and travelling the world by yourself. You’ve gotta leave your family and kids at home and rely on your family to help make life a little bit easier. That was part of the decision to move back to Australia. Apart from wanting to get away from the winter and to train throughout the summer, having that family support here definitely helps my wife look after the kids while I’m away racing for weeks on end and it keeps the whole show rolling. Being overseas by ourselves with two kids, when I was travelling so much made it real difficult and made it kind of unfair on my wife, because she was there by herself and looking after the kids the whole time with no break, rest or help. So to come back here and have both our families willing and wanting to be a part of it is awesome. It’s exciting to watch them grow up with their grandparents and it makes it a lot easier on us as a family to make life happen.”

“Living in Whistler, Crankworx almost became my adopted home race. You get to catch up, hang out, ride bikes, party and do all of the above all week with your closest mates. So it was pretty cool to have that in our backyard and it’s great to see Crankworx in New Zealand, where everyone gets ready for the Crankworx event and rolls into town to watch or race in the races. Whistler, Rotorua, Innsbruck and Les Gets are some of the most iconic venues in the world and now all these people are going there to watch and race mountain bikes is really cool. These types of festivals and events are definitely helping the sport grow and helping it grow to a greater audience so more people can come and watch.”

“It’s good to see mountain biking growing, especially in Australia. We have some great things going on with legalisation of mountain bike trails all around the country at the moment. Fingers crossed moving into the future we can see that happen sooner rather than later. Maybe some other places around Australia like Wollongong, Sydney, Victoria, Adelaide, Queensland or Western Australia might get their hands on the next Australian EWS, which would be super cool and make Australia a bit more of a mountain bike destination for people from Europe and North America. Helping get more people on bikes and more people stoked on riding!”

Rob Metz
 
Rob Metz is the main man behind Zerode Bikes, a unique bike company based in Rotorua, New Zealand. Focusing his engineering skills and mindset towards bypassing the things that don’t make sense on a bike to him, Rob works from his shed to design and bring to life gearbox mountain bikes for a truly different ride and spends a lot of time on the local trails he has helped build from the beginning in the local redwoods.

“In the mid-nineties when you could only really buy a 2-3 inch travel full suspension bikes, I was riding back country stuff with friends and in New Zealand it’s pretty chunky, our forrests are pretty dense and and theres lots of roots. So we didn’t want 2-3 inch travel bikes, we wanted 6 inch travel bikes. So we just started hacking bikes up, changing linkages and trying to put 6 inches of travel on home built bikes.

It wasn’t until I was in the forrest building trails with a friend, Dodzy, and we’d already been mucking around building our own bikes that we thought, ‘why don’t we just try this’ and then started Zerode Bikes and tried making a production bike. I was never gonna be a racer really, but Dodzy was racing at that time and he was going alright, so we thought we’d start with making the downhill bike, which was also a much easier thing to achieve, given what was available from gear boxes at the time.

So we started the design and made a few mules which are hanging up in my shed and Dodzy actually raced to 2nd in our national series around 2001.

We made something that was pretty unique and lot’s of people rode it to success. Trying to do something interesting is hard sometimes as it doesn’t always pay the bills, but ultimately you end up in the right place or something close to what you should be doing anyway, rather than busting your ass for a lifetime and retiring and dying, better have a crack at something anyway.”

“There was a guy I worked for who was actually building mountain bike frames and Dodzy used to come in as a 14 year old. His mum would bring in cakes cos we’d look after his bikes and inevitably he ended up being pretty good on a bike. There’d be a big down pour of rain and we’d be like, ‘lets go for a big mud mash!’ We’d go out and find the steepest ugliest trail we could find and have a fun sliding around.

He was just keen and willing to have a crack at anything and take a few risks, so at that point we were ready, he got stuck into building his own bike and learning how to make up the prototype.
Part of the way through the first few runs of the downhill bike, Dodzy got really busy building trails around the world for a billionaire and then some time after that he was shot and killed in a hunting accident, so I took over just as myself not that far into it. Dodzy was always there and a good influence when he was still around.”

“Personally, my happy in place is here in my shed and sometimes riding my bike. I’m not necessarily a fan of the crowds and commercialisation of the whole mountain bike thing, in many ways I feel it’s a bit of a victim of its own success. That’s just my personal thoughts though. A long time ago, anyone you met in the forest would have a really similar kind of approach to a lot of things and I guess those early adopters of mountain bikes would have probably been risk takers, or larger risk takers than most anyway. Now it seems in many ways like mountain biking is the new golf and there’s a really diverse group of people out riding.

I think it began to get a little bit weird when enduro started to become a thing. It was a type of bike riding we’d been doing for years and people had always looked at our bikes and said, ‘they’re freak bikes, you can’t ride those’ but suddenly it had a name and it had an image of goggles, fluro and matchy matchy everything. It’s great, because you’re cruising up hills and smashing back down it with your mates, which is exactly what I think mountain biking should be, just not necessarily with a watch on you, but it’s human nature that people want to race. I went to a meeting with a bunch of council people that see mountain biking as bringing a lot of money to the community. They were talking about getting more people here which equals economic growth and therefore better for the town. But I never once heard something come out of their mouths about making really good trails and then that will happen organically. That’s what happened here in the last 10 years. We’ve seen a huge increase in domestic tourism with guys from Queenstown, Nelson, or Christchurch who wouldn’t usually bother with something like this cos they’ve got their own cool back country stuff where they live, but they now come up in masses over summer, ride the trails and have a pretty amazing time.

Probably the reason Crankworx is in Rotorua is because the guys that organise Crankworx want to ride good trails and they wanna ride different trails all around the world. They’ve come here and gone, ‘well this stuff’s actually pretty good!’ And I guess that’s why they’ve held 3 EWS rounds already and Crankworx is hanging round for 7 years longer. Crankworx is just this thing that’s gonna grow mountain biking. It increases the number of people that mountain bike and the infrastructure has to grow with that. It’s great for the sport and I probably couldn’t do what I’m doing without the popularity of mountain biking.”

Mikey Haderer
 
Mike ‘Mikey’ Haderer is a jack of all trades in the mountain biking world. Coming from northern California, he lives in a central area to some of America’s best riding. With so many years in the industry, Mikey seems to know everybody and has the kind of laughter you’ll hear from a mile away and instantly have a smile on your face.

“I’ve definitely gotten pulled a lot of different directions in the bike industry, from product development, announcing and marketing. Probably one of my favourite bits is finding young kids with a lot of natural ability and helping show them the ropes, whether it be just getting them to events, or getting into contact with the right managers, product people or just sitting and talking to them on the side of the track.”

“For many years now I’ve kind of had two lives. I’ve got my bike industry life and then I come home in September, October after the bike season and fall into managing and consulting for bars, restaurants and nightclubs in my local area. It still gives me some day times to go ride my bike and you know feel free to still be a part of this family while actually making enough side cash to not live on ramen and peanut butter sandwiches all day. However, the older I’m getting the more pull I’m getting from one direction, whether it be that direction to work more in the bars and start saving for the big adult purchases, like a home or things like that or the other direction is maybe step back a little bit from the competition and get pulled into working in the bike industry full time. I think that focus has definitely shifted a little bit more as I’ve gotten more comfortable in my place in the industry. Not even necessarily just being older, but knowing that I don’t necessarily need to be the fastest guy on the hill to have some sort of value to companies that want to support me. I think that’s a tough one for a lot of kids and younger riders to understand that you don’t necessarily have to be the best guy on the hill, you really just need to have something to offer. I think that a lot of the young kids that want to take it real serious and want to figure out how to get paid and how to get sponsored and all that, need to remember it is still just riding bikes and having fun. And so if it takes riding down the hill in a budgie smuggler, kilt or a tyrannosaurus rex costume to make people have a good laugh, then I’m all for it and I’m game for that anytime. At the end of the day, this is still just riding bikes.

“We all do this because it’s our first taste of freedom, it’s the first time you could go further than walking distances. No matter how good or bad you are at a specific something in this crazy little sport it’s all meant to be for fun. And if it wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t be doing it. I think that’s part of why I’ve sort of made an infamous name for myself at these Crankworx events for doing little things here and there to remind people that we’re here to bike race and yes there’s money and people’s careers on the line, but at the end of the day, we’re still doing something that we can share with almost anybody on the planet and so if we’re not here having fun, then there’s not really a future in it.”

“You know, you have your bad days racing, your bad injuries, your friends getting injured, which is almost tougher on you and those are always rough days. But, they seem to kind of get pushed back a lot deeper into your memory than some of the better ones that always will pull you out. One that will always stick out in my mind would be the opportunity to go Canberra in 2009 for World Championships which I competed at in Four Cross. To be in the top six riders and go to represent your country was always a great memory. Being there and watching Steve Pete finally break his curse and get out from underneath this big monster that was on his back for his 20 something year career of being the fastest guy on the hill and then being struck by disaster in World Champs so many times was just awesome. After crossing the finish line, Steve sat in the bed of a truck and then had to watch the last three riders to come down. Greg Minnaar being the last guy down was sprinting the long finish straight and then over a blind jump into the finish corral and we always say that Greg came over that blind jump, saw that his time was still green and right behind the green timing board was Steve, sitting in the hot seat. We always joke that he landed and subconsciously stabbed his brakes, just a tiny bit, meaning Steve won by two thousandths of a second. He finally got his rainbow stripes, he finally did it, against his teammate and good friend. To be there in person and get to see the monkey off his back in a flash of a second, it was a really, really good one. Anytime I find myself wondering, ‘why am I doing wind sprints right now? I’m 30 something years old, This is stupid!’ I think of Peaty and that I still have that monkey on my back. For him it was world champs, for me it’s the Sea Otter and slalom. “