Crankworx 2016 is underway! We’re two days in to Crankworx now and the run of bad weather is doing it’s best to sabotage proceedings. The Crankworx team, however, are doing a great job at staying one step ahead and adapting to the challenges. They’ve been keeping the courses covered in the wet and juggling events in the schedule to ensure they all go ahead when the weather windows appear.
It was so bad yesterday (Thursday) that all events were cancelled, but they had pulled some events forward to Wednesday and pushed some back until today to compensate.
It’s all been pretty cool so far though. The teams and brands filtered into town on Tuesday, setting up their colourful, branded camps in the car parks all around town. The tow truck companies were kept busy shipping out cars whose owners had bypassed the barriers or hadn’t seen the signs. The Polygon camp below is in the car park we christened dog poo alley when we arrived in Les Gets. I’m happy to report it’s all clear now.
The main Crankworx events kicked off properly on Wednesday. We picked the kids up from school at lunchtime and headed down to the pump track in town where they were running free training sessions for the kids. There were drinks, snacks, freebies, stickers, a colouring in station, wooden games and all that malarky.
We strolled up to the courses to watch practice for the ‘speed and style’ which is a comp where the competitors are scored on their time down the course but can gain seconds for style of their tricks on the way down. We were all pretty impressed with the riders flipping, spinning and rolling high through the air over the final jump. Nutters! (And this was the smaller of the two kickers!)
We returned to the ‘Carry’ area for the ‘Whip-Off’ at 6 o’clock. If you’re not familiar, a whip is a trick where riders take off the jump and then turn the bike sideways so that the back wheel comes all the way round. They can also simultaneously twist it up so it’s almost cruising parallel with the ground. In some cases it looks like they’re almost flying backwards! They then need to bring the bike back round and straighten up before landing. Riders are scored on things like amplitude (size of the jump), style, smoothness and how far the rear comes round. Whips are cool as heck and they’re on my ‘must learn’ list for this summer. We met up with a bunch of friends near the course and grabbed a beer from the AprèSki Bar to enjoy while we spectated. The kids watched for a bit before losing interest and heading off to run about and play with their friends.
The weather held off and the competitors put on an amazing show, sailing off an insanely big kicker and clearing a massive gap before hitting the landing at a hell of a lick. There were a few almighty stacks but as far as we could see, everyone got up, walked away and got back to it.
The Whip-Off competition finished with Casey Brown taking top spot for the ladies and Bernado Cruz grabbing the men’s crown. We streamed back through town with the masses, towards home and past the concert stage in the centre of town beside the Irish Bar. It was filling up with people and looked like it’d be a good night with the weather holding out and with DJs Fly and Greens kicking off their sets shortly and until midnight. A school night for us though and the kids needed to catch up on some sleep so we headed home and after a quick detour to the neighbours’ house for a cup of tea/beer, we headed home and hit the sack.
There’s loads of events scheduled for this afternoon after yesterday’s cancellations and as I’m writing, it seems to be getting brighter outside (wahoo!). The big events are scheduled for Saturday and Sunday when larger crowds are expected and there’s live broadcast slots to meet. Fingers crossed that the weather continues to improve! The schedule shifts have resulted in a shortage of marshals and there have been requests on the Morzine Crew Facebook page asking for help from anyone who is able to volunteer.
You can catch live coverage of this afternoon’s action and the weekend’s on the Crankworx website and the Slopestyle main event will be on Red Bull TV tomorrow at 4.30pm CEST. 3.30pm in the UK. It promises to be great!
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