Nine Knights freeride comp
Hannah Barnes Sam Hill’s favourite riding spots Autumnal kit Missy ‘The Missile’ Giove New Kona Process Specialized’s big-hitting Kenevo e-bike
THERE AREN’T MANY mountain bike events that create images as striking as those from Suzuki Nine Knights. It was a dream of mine to ride there, and I finally got the chance to do it for the first time last year. I’m not your usual contest rider, but then Nine Knights isn’t your usual contest. The riders stay for a week and ride each day, as if they were sessioning trails at home – it just so happens that there are cameras catching the action from every angle! This year, I arrived at a course built by my good friends Sam Naturally I felt a little uneasy
Reynolds and Clemens Kaudela. Naturally, I felt a little uneasy about what they might have created – these two are as gnarly as they come! I was greeted by ramps and features in every direction.
Built around natural contours, the course sat at 2,200m above sea level, with incredible views all round. The Reschenpass region of the South Tyrol, on the AustrianSwiss border, boasts some of the most breathtaking scenery I’ve ever been lucky enough to witness, and the boys had built a dream playground in the foreground. The format of the event was that invited photographers would go up against each other in a series of categories and riders would compete for a number of prizes too. This contest was a progressive vision of how things could be done, built by riders, for riders. The formula was taken from the event’s background in snow sports, and it’s a very good one indeed.
Photographers, videographers and drone pilots had one hell of a line-up to choose from when shooting, too – everything from the latest world-first banger tricks from Emil Johansson to the timeless style of Nico Vink. In fact, the line-up of riders for the week was all-time [for those unversed in freeride speak, this means ‘the best ever’! ~ Ed], with features to match each person. Highlights for me included Nicholi Rogatkin’s DH bike twister, Sam Reynolds blasting the quarter to the moon and watching Geoff ‘Gully’ Gulevich flow through lines with Timo Pritzel in tow.
There were a couple of sunrise sessions lined up, which I was super-keen to attend. The ‘illumination’ category at Nine Knights is one that the photographers take very seriously, and most of the images you see from the event will have been taken at 6am. I got onto the lift at 5am, padded up, and headed up the mountain to be greeted by iced-up ramps – but that was nothing that a blowtorch couldn’t fix! Riders and photographers waited eagerly for the sun to peek over the horizon before dropping in and collecting some of the most amazing shots in mountain biking. Nine Knights is definitely a lesson in putting on a killer event. I left Reschenpass with a grin on my face and some of the best memories of my bicycleriding l ife. Fingers crossed, I’ll be back again next year!