Chris Smith, freerider

In issue 6 of Privateer, we spent a day with pro freerider Chris Smith, finding out how you manage to make a career of riding a moutain bike.

Words by Seb Rogers

There’s probably an unwritten law that anyone who earns their living piloting a bike from one piece of terra firma to another via thin air is a bit, well, unusual. To quote the elderly next door neighbour of a mountain biker friend of mine, ‘it’s not normal’.  On the face of it, she’s got a point. Bikes, after all, were designed to function with their wheels firmly attached - via the pull of gravity, if nothing else - to the ground. They’re plainly not designed for flying.

And yet.

And yet there are clearly a few individuals who not only flout the laws of physics on a daily basis, but get paid for the privilege.

Chris Smith is one of them. Professional freerider, husband and proud dad, he’s earnt a living for nearly 10 years putting his bike’s wheels in places where fragile concoctions of stainless steel, aluminium and rubber have no place being. It’s hard to know which of these is the greater achievement - doing ‘not normal’ things on a bike in the first place, or supporting a family on the back of such antics. On balance, I’ll go with the second. There have to be easier ways to pay the mortgage than putting your neck on the line for a photo, or a video sequence.

Chris knows this better than most. In 2003, barely a year or so into his budding career as arguably the UK’s only professional freerider, he broke his back by failing to land a huge drop. It was to be a pivotal moment in his career.

‘I did a big step down the day before [I crashed] and it was really smooth’, he says. ‘It rained the rest of that day, so I thought I’d go and have a look at this other big gap at Salisbury.’ He’d spent the past few months riding steadily bigger drops and had had his eye on a huge road gap for a while. ‘The next day I went back there and set about clearing it out, chopping down trees, clearing the run in and run out. And I just decided to do it’.

It was a monster. ‘I’d say you’re dropping about 30 to 35 foot and covering the same distance over the ground. But it’s over a big gulley, so at the highest point just after you take off you’re probably, I’d say, about 50 or 60 foot off the ground.’ Not that this particularly bothered him. ‘I thought because it’s so high, you know if you jump off a big height you tend to go a long way out anyway, so I thought basically if you’ve got the balls to go off it you’re gonna make it. But I misjudged it really’, he adds with just a touch of understatement.

When the ambulance crew arrived to scrape Chris off the floor and take him to hospital, they couldn’t understand why he was unable to move. The message that had got through was that he’d fallen off his bike. They didn’t believe him when he told them he’d fallen from the top of the gulley, 50 feet above.

Not normal, see?

 

You can read the full feature, with photos by Seb Rogers, in issue 6 of Privateer, on sale now.