‘I’ve never been to a desert before, except Egypt on a package holiday.’
Tom Isted has me nervous. Despite his reassurance that he’s going to keep things chilled and just try and get down in one piece, his YouTube videos speak to a ‘wreckers or chequers’ approach to riding. That might not be too consequential at his local bike park, Woody’s, in the rolling hills of Cornwall. But out at the exposed ridges of Virgin Utah, where Tom is heading to take part in his first Red Bull Rampage, the price of error could be pretty steep:
‘I personally haven’t got any expectations for myself. I’m just going to have fun. It’s my first year, so I’m just gonna go have fun and just try – not do more than I can chew. I’m going with the plan to try and do as well as I can, but I’m not gonna start trying to backflip a 90 foot step down or anything stupid. I’m just going to be keeping it in the wheelhouse and keeping it under control.’
Of course, you don’t just get to show up at Rampage, and Tom tells me he’s been working to get accepted for three years. He’s visited Europe’s mini-Utah in the Black Hills of France and worked on his exposed and loose ridge riding skills. He’s spent a bunch of time riding in New Zealand with former Rampage competitor Connor MacFarlane. There, Tom has ridden the terrain on which Connor filmed his Rampage application video – and got accepted. And of course there’s Tom’s slopestyle feats, including his world record 110ft backflip at Darkfest. All of this stands him in good stead for the technical side of riding at Red Bull Rampage. But before you can ride, you have to dig, and I can’t help wonder if he’s underestimating what lies ahead:
‘Because it’s an old site there’s already pre-built stuff, there’ll be old lines from previous years and so, there shouldn’t be as much to worry about, building wise’.
Acclimatisation doesn’t quite go to plan – a cancelled flight puts him and digger Joel Anderson a whole day behind schedule. Connor awaits, melting gently in Las Vegas. Eventually they head out to the old Rampage site where they report that it’s ’hot and dry’. Who would have thought it?
With only Connor on the team with any desert experience, the gang are at quite the disadvantage to the other Red Bull Rampage riders. All the other men have competed at Rampage before, with the exception of Tom and Luke Whitlock – but he’s from Reno, Nevada – practically a local. Success at Rampage is a marathon – the few minutes of adrenaline that you see on TV is just the grand finale to eight brutal days of digging and building.
I join them out at the site after their first rest day – and on the first day the riders are allowed to bring bikes to the site and start trying their lines. But Tom is still digging – Connor and Joel too. Joel tells me it’s almost exactly as he expected it to be, but only because everyone had repeatedly told him it would be incredibly hard. ‘Luckily, Tom jumps a long way, so less metres for us to dig!’, he jokes.
Apparently the team have been questioning their qualifications for the task at hand, because they’ve decided they know exactly who they’d want on their team in future: a coal stoker. One of those people that shovels coal into a furnace at a steel mill, or on a steam train, perhaps. Basically, someone who will keep shovelling, all the way through the firey gates of hell.
It’s not all torture though. On the bright side, Tom reflects that the dirt is so dry and light that you can shovel a lot of it. On the dark side, one of the shovels they bought has a black handle and has to be hosed off to cool it down before it can be picked up. Back on the bright side, Tom is sharing parts of his line, spreading the build load between teams.
Down low, he’s sharing a couple of features with second year Rampage rider Talus Turk, and fellow newb Luke Whitlock. Up above, he’s under the wing of Tyler ‘T-Mac’ McCaul. There is probably no one else on the hill with as much experience out here as T-Mac – having competed in a bunch of Rampage events alongside his brother, Tyler has now moved to live and ride this terrain full time. I feel momentarily reassured that in the towering pinnacles and ridges above the show time jumps low down, Tom will be in good hands.
My reassurance is short lived however, as Tom explains that he and Tyler have collaborated on a giant canyon gap step down. The perfectly sculpted shark fin leading into a 25 feet or more drop that they’re building before me suddenly seems like child’s play. I ask whether Tom will be giving Tyler first dibs on guineaing this new giant 74ft canyon gap, which will soon appear all over social media with captions along the lines of ‘how scary/terrifying/crazy is this?’. Tom says they’ve decided that whoever goes first gets to name it, and he thinks Tyler already has a name picked out. Tom doesn’t seem in a hurry to christen this child, so I figure he probably won’t be going first.
I leave Tom to his rock carrying and soil packing, and return once the shark fin is complete. Tom launches off it, then into the final series of jumps. A flip into the half pipe lower down lands him rubber side down, but a giant puff of dust indicates that he’s drifted off the packed line and into the rough. He returns for another run, shrugging it off as a soft landing.
When I check in again the next day, all is not quite rosy. Everyone’s nerves have taken a knock as Clemens Kaudela is winched off one of the high canyons and away by helicopter to hospital. It takes a long while for a status report to emerge – never a great sign. It’s a reminder that things can go very wrong. Things have also gone slightly awry for Tom, who is limping after a hard slam on his hip. But there’s still building to be done and he hobbles around making adjustments to his line. I get the sense that he’s gritting his teeth a little, and leave him to it.
Another consequence of Clemens’ crash is that Tom and Tyler have some extra building to do. The landing from their canyon gap was damaged in the scramble to get to Clemens, and with all the medics on the scene. It can’t be helped, and no one resents it, but it’s extra work to be done and a delay to the chance to test the jump.
Wednesday is spent rebuilding the canyon lander, and getting the rest of the features on the line ticked off. Tom conducts what seems to me an extraordinary ritual, sitting on a jump and removing his grips before pushing them into place. He tells me he doesn’t glue them on because he wears them out so often he likes to swap them often and easily. I can’t help wonder how on earth they stay put as he twists and turns through the air. It’s a wonder to watch his aerial gymnastics, and even more impressive to realise that his brain is not just sending signals to his body to send limbs this way and that, but it’s also receiving information at the same time. We get a demonstration of his quick thinking as a slightly off line landing threatens to tip him off the edge of a huge drop. He throws his bike and concentrates on falling, rolling, and stopping – coming to a halt just before the lip of the cliff, on a neighbouring piece of build that’s shared between Talus Turk, Bienvenido Aguado Alba, and Luke Whitlock. Us onlookers let out a collective breath of relief as he stands up in a cloud of dust, collects his bike, and heads unharmed for another run. I try not to think of the canyon above, with its narrow landing. A bail out up there might not end so well.
I catch Alex Reveles, Tyler’s lifelong friend and ‘speed judge’, among the crowd. He helps Tyler figure out the right speed to take for new features. Alex tells me that Tyler is a great coach, not a wild risk taker, and will do a fine job of getting Tom safely over the canyon. I head to watch the women’s competition feeling somewhat reassured that Tom is in safe hands.
The next thing I know, there’s social media footage of Tom leaping across the canyon, landing, before tumbling wildly down the scree, off line. I feel like a parent, glad not to know what my teenager gets up to on an evening. Sometimes knowing about things after the fact (about 10 years later, kids, if you’re reading this) is better for all concerned.
When I realise the canyon feature is called the ‘BFC’, I clock that this is not the name Tyler had picked out. That’s because Tom went first. And that acronym does not stand for ‘Big Friendly Canyon’. Tom gets another go at landing it, and manages to stick to his line, sort of. It’s rubber side down at least, for what Tom calls the ‘wildest 10 seconds of his life’. Wind keeps him from trying again on Friday evening, and indeed until his competition run.
On competition day, Tom tells me of his decision to take the canyon gap before T-Mac: ‘I’m quite good at YOLOing stuff‘. I can’t help but hope that ‘once’ doesn’t end today. Not for the first time I wonder what Tom’s version of ‘scary’ looks like, if this is his version of ‘chill’ and ‘keeping it under control’,‘The first one was quite scary, the second went well and then got scary. I just need to get my braking and slow down’
Practice is almost non-existent, with the wind swirling around the hillside until well after the sun has burned round into the crevices on the hillside. There’s no time for Tom to string all his features together, and instead he throws down some tricks in his lower drops and jumps.
By the time he’s lining up at the start gate for his first ever top to bottom run at Red Bull Rampage, the helicopter is in the air and every move is being broadcast live. The commentator talks up ‘Ice-T’ and his fearlessness. In the sweltering heat of the late start, I wonder if that’s spelled ‘Ice-T’ or ‘Iced Tea’. A casual back flip up the top suggests he’s cool and comfortable, and he makes his way neatly through the definitely-not-slopestyle steep chutes. Then, a slight misalignment on the hip before the canyon has him hauling on the brakes – the angle was wrong and he wouldn’t have the speed needed for the canyon. He hikes his bike back up, to the start of the take off from which he’s down his first two attempts on the BFC. To the relief – and cheers – of everyone, he clears it and sticks the landing, riding on through his line and into another back flip. The wind whips up clouds of dust as he heads towards the lower drops, a windsock horizontal as he drops back into the shadows then pops out into the sun for the shark fin. He flips the shark fin, just holding on to the edge of the trail, but once again hauling on the brakes as his speed is off for the next shark fin. Momentum lost, but skin saved, he rolls through to the finish corral, skipping his final showtime jumps.
It’s the first chance he’s had to try and string the whole line together, and it’s not quite come together for him. He focuses on his second run – another chance to link it all together. The fates have other plans however. Cam Zink crashes, and the delay while he is helicoptered off to hospital puts the second runs into conflict with the afternoon winds.
It’s now a race against wind and light. The helicopter can’t fly after 6pm, so everything needs to be done by then if the TV coverage is to be there. Plus, it goes dark fast out there, and the organisers want everyone off site before the sun sets. There needs to be time for everyone to have a chance for their second run, plus podium presentations. The wind whips, and spectators bake in the heat as sun shades are taken down, being blown inside out in the gusts.
By the time the wind has dropped enough to consider sending riders up the hill, it’s 5pm. It’s the longest the organisers have ever waited to fit in second runs, but conditions are still less than ideal. Once they decide that the wind has dropped enough to offer riders the potential to complete runs, each competitor will get an eight minute slot in which to pick their moment. Dust devils swirl at the bottom of the course as Tommy G squeezes in his second run before his eight minute slot times out. It’s now Tom’s turn, and the clock starts to count down his opportunity to finally get that one smooth, linked run.
The windsock at the top flips and flops in every direction, like a conductor’s baton in a particularly rowdy symphony. When it does steady for a beat, it points straight at the cliff faces: a headwind. Tom stares into the sun at the wind at the top, both coming directly at him, as if to pin him in place. The minutes count down, cameras rolling, helicopter hovering, commentators filling the time with chat about Tom’s fearless debut at Red Bull Rampage, until eventually his time is up. He hands over to Brandon Semenuk, whose line takes him in the opposite direction to Tom’s. He seizes a gap in the wind and takes the win as the wind wins the day. No one else completes a second run, and the dig teams gather up their tools as they climb back down off the steeps and head back to camp.
Tom surprises me by telling me that ‘It was the easiest decision I’ve ever made’. Between the sun blinding him and the wind threatening to swipe him into the cliffs, he had no desire to risk himself on a second run. ‘Not a bad debut. I am quite fearless, but I am half smart when it comes to that stuff’. Much to my relief, he’s lived to ride another day – and is already planning for his return. I wonder, after all he’s learnt this week, he’d build the same line again? ‘I don’t want to build another one, so if I come back and ride this one it’ll be a lot easier!’. He’s clearly planning on a return trip to Red Bull Rampage, especially now he’s got his head around the terrain: ‘It’s lived up to expectations and more. It’s as stressful as you’d expect, and the exposure is twice as bad. But I’m used to it now.’
For now, the season is done and he’s going on holiday – away from the dry desert and into the humid climes of Florida. At first I think this seems the perfect foil to two weeks in the desert, but then I wonder how much fun rollercoasters would seem after the two weeks he’s just had. Are theme parks part of the plan? ‘Probably not, I’m just going to play golf’ he says. After his version of a ‘chilled’ debut at Red Bull Rampage, I hope the greenkeepers of Florida are ready for him…
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Thanks to ABUS for contributing to Hannah’s travel expenses.
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