Snow bike gold? He’ll flip you for it
BUTTERMILK, MOUNTAIN, COLO.— A snow bike is the unlikely child of a motorbike and a snowmobile; it’s designed to ride in the backcountry and, above all, it is not designed to flip.
But Brett Turcotte is predisposed to believe that anything with handlebars can be flipped.
The 30-year-old from Clearwater, B.C., has been a professional rider since he was 13 years old, racing and flipping every- thing from mountain bikes and dirt bikes to heavy snowmobiles.
“When I first got my snow bike everyone said, ‘It’s impossible, you’ll never flip one.’ That just lit the fire and it got me motivated to actually go do it and I proved it’s possible,” Turcotte said.
In doing that two years ago, he helped create a whole new sport that’s at the X Games for the first time, in the snow bike best trick event Sunday night.
Proving something is possible, though, doesn’t suddenly make it easy.
Turcotte won gold in his first event here Thursday night, racing and throwing tricks, including the kiss-of-death backflip, off a jump on a snowmobile.
But a backflip on a snow bike — which has a ski for a front wheel and a track at the back — is a totally different beast.
“They’re way underpowered. A snow bike has 40 horsepower compared to a snowmobile’s 140. They’re not meant to flip,” Turcotte said.
When he flips a snowmobile, the machine’s rotational mass does about 60 per cent of the work, leaving him in control of 40 per cent of the movement. But with a snow bike he has to work much harder and his body movement accounts for 70 per cent of the flip, Turcotte explained. It amounts to a much slower flip than all the others and that takes some patience to get right.
Before he figured all that out, there were fails — and that’s a particularly scary thing.
“The bike tries to chase you down. You can relate it a bit to bull riding. You’re doing everything you can to get away from it,” Turcotte said.
There’s no safety switch, so the track on the back keeps spinning after a rider comes off, and that can send the snow bike into wild cartwheels in unpredictable directions.
“The sport is so new, we’re just out there doing out best,” he said. “But it’s cool to see how the boundaries can get pushed.”
Turcotte may need a $20,000 machine for snow bike, but in attitude he sounds exactly like the pioneering freestyle skiers and snowboarders who are landing tricks in their X Games events here that plenty of people used to say couldn’t be done.
For him, it’s a way of life. Turcotte grew up in his dad’s snowmobile dealership. Where kids in the city learn to ride tricycles his own kids get dirt bikes with training wheels.
“We live on a mountainside and our driveway is a kilometre long, and when the weather is nice our10-yearold drives a dirt bike to the bus stop,” he said of their home an hour north of Kamloops.
“(Hannah) gets off the bus and all the kids are peeking out the windows as she gets on her dirt bike and rides to the house.”
The competitors in snowmobile and snow bike events, for the most part, come from a different sports background than the skiers and snowboarders here, but they consider themselves athletes just the same.
Fellow Canadian Brock Hoyer, another snow bike pioneer who won gold in the X Games debut of snow bike cross last year, originally picked the sport up as a way to extend his dirt bike training into the winter.
“We’re putting our bodies and brains through an incredible amount of stress and the things we’re doing are athletic,” Turcotte said. “I have a nutritionist and a personal trainer. I take it seriously. I have one big event a year here to do well for my sponsors and I put in the work.”
A few years ago it was rare to see a snow bike, but that’s starting to change, Turcotte said. “It’s relative to when snowboarding broke on the scene compared to skiing and everyone is kind of looking at them: What is that?” he said. “It’s cool to be in the forefront of a sport like that.”